Network Effects on Health
The article can be found here
This article offers a new appropriate twist on the age old saying “you are what you eat.” Rather, you are now “what your friends eat” as networks have begun to pervade all aspects of human health. The “principles of sociogenomics,” or how socializing systems can integrate into genomics and molecular biology, has become a prominent area of study. As humans become more socially connected, our health and physical well-being become more connected and influenceable as well. Relating this into our day-to-day life, rather than making health-decisions on our own, we are frequently basing them on the norms of social groups — like fad diets for instance. If everyone on your block is doing the new juice cleanse or going to the new gym, you will want to try it as well. In a more negative light, if you see 12 Instagrams of chocolate cake, you will probably want to eat some chocolate cake also. Thinking about this in terms of information cascades, if everyone on your Facebook feed switches to Planet Fitness instead of LA Fitness, then you will follow the crowd.
The article also draws on the sociology of health and the interdependent webs of support and relationships. According to the study, health behaviors are dependent upon relationships — shown by the fact that “tobacco use, alcohol consumption, drug use, exercise, and weight gain are all socially transmittable.” Examining something like drug use specifically, we can imagine a situation in which an informational cascade could play a part in a rise in use– the more something is encouraged, the more people believe it. Who we surround ourselves with has an even bigger impact on our lives than our parents warned us about way back when. Or, on a more positive note, examining the large decrease in cigarette smoking every year. Here, the New York Times tributes the drop in smoking is largely affected by media campaigns. Eventually during the big tobacco scandals, a tipping point was hit when enough information was given to the public and the smoking rate has dropped ever since.
In a study done by Christakis and Fowler in 2010, they found that “obesity can spread through social networks in a manner reminiscent of an infectious disease or a fad,” and the likelihood of a person becoming obese was influenced by “whether or not his/her social contacts became obese during the same period.”
This inherent socialization of health and medicine in this century causes some interesting problems. Now health must be looked at and addressed not only on a personalized and intimate level but also through the collective community that a person is in. The new model of medicine will have to embrace the influence of social networks as well as the complexity of the individual. Soon enough doctors will be thinking about network affects and information cascades as well.