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Biomedical subjects

Ruth E Malone

Publications and source records attributed to Ruth E Malone.

32 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed2003

Altria means tobacco: Philip Morris's identity crisis.

Philip Morris Companies, the world's largest and most profitable tobacco seller, has changed its corporate name to The Altria Group. The company has also embarked on a plan to improve its corporate image. Examination of internal company documents reveals that these changes have been planned for over a decade and that the company expects to reap specific and substantial rewards from them. Tobacco control advocates should be alert to the threat Philip Morris's plans pose to industry focused tobacco control campaigns. Company documents also suggest what the vulnerabilities of those plans are and how advocates might best exploit them.

Consumer Advocacy↗
PubMed2003

The outing of Philip Morris: advertising tobacco to gay men.

OBJECTIVES: This case study describes the events surrounding the first time a major tobacco company advertised in gay media. METHODS: We analyzed internal tobacco company documents, mainstream newspapers, and the gay press. RESULTS: Philip Morris was unprepared for the attention its entry into the gay market received. The company's reaction to this incident demonstrates that its approach to the gay community both parallels and diverges from industry strategies toward other marginalized communities. CONCLUSIONS: The tobacco industry's relationship to the gay community is relatively undeveloped, a fact that may provide tobacco control advocates an opportunity for early intervention. The gay community's particular vulnerabilities to the industry make development of gay tobacco control programs crucial to reducing gay smoking prevalence and industry presence in the community.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Tobacco industry surveillance of public health groups: the case of STAT (Stop Teenage Addiction to Tobacco) and INFACT (Infant Formula Action Coalition).

OBJECTIVES: The goal of this study was to describe how the tobacco industry collects information about public health groups. METHODS: Publicly available internal tobacco industry documents were reviewed and analyzed using a chronological case study approach. RESULTS: The industry engaged in aggressive intelligence gathering, used intermediaries to obtain materials under false pretenses, sent public relations spies to the organizations' meetings, and covertly taped strategy sessions. Other industry strategies included publicly minimizing the effects of boycotts, painting health advocates as "extreme," identifying and exploiting disagreements, and planning to "redirect the funding" of tobacco control organizations to other purposes. CONCLUSIONS: Public health advocates often make light of tobacco industry observers, but industry surveillance may be real, intense, and covert and may obstruct public health initiatives.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2002

Economism, efficiency, and the moral ecology of good nursing practice.

The free-market rhetoric dominating health-policy discussions today frames health-care goods and services as commodities that consumers will or will not buy at a given price. Health-care systems are being redesigned and hospitals restructured with a view to increased efficiency and productivity. Drawing on the experiences of clinical nurses in the United States, this paper shows how the application of economism to nursing may severely disrupt the ecology of good practice, leading to difficulties in meeting minimal standards of nursing care and severely constraining the acts of compassion called for by the human experiences of illness, loss, and death. Concerns about moral responsibility and conflicts between institutional and nursing goals are described. Increasing mistrust of health-care systems on the part of practitioners, patients, and families suggests that it is time to attend closely to the moral ecology of caring practices.

Economics, Nursing↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Accustomed to enduring: experiences of African-American women seeking care for cardiac symptoms.

OBJECTIVE: Understand the meaning of delayed treatment seeking in African-American women with unstable angina and myocardial infarction. METHODS: Phenomenologic analysis of in-depth interview data and field notes on 12 African-American women hospitalized with unstable angina or myocardial infarction. RESULTS: Women's interpretation of and response to symptoms were informed by experiences of marginalization and their self-understanding as people who were strong and who had endured life's hardships. When hospitalized, some women experienced trivialization of their complaints by clinicians and a focus on technological procedures over respectfully attending to their concerns, which provided further disincentives to seeking care. Three major themes emerged: misrecognition and discounting of symptoms, enduring, and influence of faith. CONCLUSIONS: Experiences of marginalization shape responses to symptoms, care-seeking behavior, and interpretation of subsequent care experiences for African-American women with cardiac disease, who may experience different symptoms as well as interpret them differently than members of other groups.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

High school journalists' perspectives on tobacco.

How issues are covered in the media is an important factor in influencing public opinion, policy, and individual behavior. During the 1990s, the tobacco control movement developed a youth focus, prompted by research showing that most adult smokers begin tobacco use as teens. However, concern has been raised that this youth focus has derailed the overall goal of achieving a smoke-free society. Numerous studies have analyzed tobacco coverage and documented the impacts of media messages on youth. To learn how tobacco is covered in a medium primarily produced by and for youth, we conducted an analysis of tobacco coverage in high school newspapers. High school newspapers, like other media, communicate social messages through both content selection and framing. We surveyed a national sample of high school journalists and conducted content and frames analyses of tobacco articles (n = 257) from their publications. The most commonly used frame was "kids" (46%), followed by "killer" (31%), "nonsmokers' rights" (10%), and "choice" (5%). "Kids"-framed articles were less likely to mention health effects and less likely to be favorable toward tobacco control policies than "killer"-framed articles. In addition, many "kids" articles included "resistance statements" congruent with viewing tobacco use as rebellion and/or independence. Lack of a consistently used frame has been identified as a barrier to effective tobacco control. Tobacco control media advocacy should focus on developing frames that are easily communicated, consistently used, and compatible with the developmental tasks of adolescents. Youth journalists should also be included in media advocacy efforts.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Pictures worth a thousand words: noncommercial tobacco content in the lesbian, gay, and bisexual press.

Smoking prevalence in the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) community is higher than in the mainstream population. The reason is undetermined; however, normalization of tobacco use in the media has been shown to affect smoking rates. To explore whether this might be a factor in the LGB community, we examined noncommercial imagery and text relating to tobacco and smoking in LGB magazines and newspapers. Tobacco-related images were frequent and overwhelmingly positive or neutral about tobacco use. Images frequently associated smoking with celebrities. Text items unrelated to tobacco were often illustrated with smoking imagery. Text items about tobacco were likely to be critical of tobacco use; however, there were three times as many images as text items. The number of image items was not accounted for by the number of text items: nearly three quarters of all tobacco-related images (73.8%) were unassociated with relevant text. Tobacco imagery is pervasive in LGB publications. The predominant message about tobacco use in the LGB press is positive or neutral; tobacco is often glamorized. Noncommercial print images of smoking may normalize it, as movie product placement does. Media advocacy approaches could counter normalization of smoking in LGB-specific media.

Bisexuality↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Nursing's involvement in tobacco control: historical perspective and vision for the future.

There is little evidence that nursing organizations have played a major leadership role in addressing tobacco control at the political level, and none have addressed collectively, in any sustained way, the role of the tobacco industry, the primary vector of the tobacco disease epidemic. The aims of this article are (a) to explore what accounts for organized nursing's relative quiescence about tobacco industry and (b) to elucidate why a nursing voice would be especially effective in addressing the industry as a vector of the tobacco disease epidemic. Drawing on the internal tobacco industry documents research, and incorporating a critical theoretical perspective on education, research, and practice, it is argued that tobacco cessation cannot be viewed solely as an individual problem but must be understood in a sociopolitical context and promoting a nursing agendum on cessation research and practice requires educating (and energizing) nurses on the sociopolitics of tobacco. Because of nurses' numbers, class status, political capital, and moral authority in society, they are the group of health professionals whose voices are needed urgently at this historical moment to help avert the global tobacco epidemic. The Nightingales is an example of a nursing group involved in activism against the tobacco industry, applying findings from research on the industry to engage nurses in tobacco control activism, research, and education. The cessation research agenda should include research on the tobacco industry and how its activities influence cessation, how political activism influences cessation, and how critical education may advance cessation research, policies, and practices.

Health Education↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Using marginalization theory to examine pedestrian injury: a case study.

Hall, Stevens, and Meleis' critical feminist theory of marginalization provides a useful lens through which to examine both the role of the automobile in Western society and the related phenomenon of automobile-pedestrian injury. This article draws on a specific case of automobile-pedestrian fatality in San Francisco's Mission District to show how the marginalization of neighborhoods, groups, and individuals occurs in an autocentric environment. Nurses can use concepts of marginalization to inform and dialogue with communities about healthier, safer transportation options and ways to achieve them.

Accidents, Traffic↗