Health Games

So, last week we talked about health games and the strength of them when dealing with health interventions. Speaking from personal experience I know they worked. In Peace Corps, we were responsible for creating a health fair. I was teamed up with another volunteer and we had to do the booth on Malaria. We had arragned to get about 100 mosquito nets donated so we wanted to give those out but we wanted the people attending the fair to work to get them. So, we had them play a version of the cake walk to get the nets. We had music playing and when we would stop it the person standing on the picture of the mosquito would answer a quetion (of course with assistance they would always get it right) and then we would give the net. It was hillarious because the Timorese had never seen something like it before and they just loved it. In addition, we had set up a coloring table underneath a net for kids to color educational pictures. My fellow volunteers all used games at their booths also and the entire event was a total sucess. Just that experience with games and health really showed me how powerful they can be.
I was just searching for games on the internet and there are a ton of health related webbased games. There really is something for everyone and I just need to get more internet savy to make sure I am not missing out anything good!

Idol Gives Back, do you

I was flipping through the channels last night and just happened to stop on American Idol and it was there special, Idol Gives Back show. Every single one of the stories they told asking for donations and for ‘us’ to make a change were health related. Yes, I think American Idol is a joke but talk about a good channel for getting the word out there about health disparities in this world. They had a ton of well recognized celebrities talking about and visiting malaria stricken villages and AIDS orphans in Africa and poor parts in New York were nobody has health insurance. They even had the Prime Minister of England on donating 20 million mosquito nets worth $200 million (I wonder if the nets will be used properly or if they will be used as fishing nets instead? I am a little hesitant to just give out nets because I have seen how just giving them may not be the best solution). I see this show as a form of media advocacy because although they were soliciting donations they were also raising awareness amongst people who may not otherwise pay attention to these health issues. Is this wrong-reason health promotion? I don’t think so, I see it as one of the only ways to teach millions of people who would not otherwise pay attention about health issues that are affecting our world. Yes, I do remain skeptical about where the money actually goes and because of that I did not donate but none the less I feel Idol Gives Back was a great way to get important health messages out to the masses.