Is a social media strategy that helped gay men fight HIV now help fight against drug abuse potent opioids? That is the question a team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), application in a pilot study highlighted by officials from the White House last week.
The peer education Exploiting Online (HOPE) procedure is just one of more than 0 administration of research projects Obama highlighted July 6, as he announced new action against the growing epidemic of opioids in the US. With research projects, the administration is seeking to better educate opioid prescribers, strengthen supervision of prescription drugs, and to allow the safe disposal of unneeded drugs.
The intervention of HOPE, led by psychologist Sean Young, Ph.D., associate professor of family medicine and executive director of the University of California Institute for Technology Forecasting, aims to exploit the immense power of social media to improve public health. Instead of adopting a clinical approach to reducing opiate abuse, which often involves prescribing alternative medications such as naloxone, the study aims to change behavior. For 12 weeks, $ 170,000 pilot project, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will begin later this month, the team of Young plans to recruit approximately 60 patients of the medical center UCLA Ronald Regan who experience chronic pain, are on therapy long-term opioids, and reported other behaviors such as drug or alcohol abuse that put them at high risk of addiction. Researchers will ask each participant to connect to a private Facebook group where they can share articles, comments, photos and other private messages, as well as eight pairs of models that are also therapy opioids in the long term. Peer models should share tips and successes and challenges they have experienced in managing their pain.
To assess whether the strategy works, Young monitor changes in the participants reported using opioids and other substances. Most of the time, however, Young says the effort is a "feasibility and accessibility" study. He asked whether participants find such useful intervention, easy to use and accessible, and if they will be willing to discuss sensitive issues in an online community. Young also hopes the results, which should be compiled by the end of the year, will provide enough preliminary evidence to help raise money for a larger trial testing using social media to fight against the abuse of a greater number of substances.
Previously, Young used a model of support by online peer similar encouraging a group of homosexual men Peru to get tested for HIV. This driver has found that men who participated were 2-3 times more likely to get tested for HIV than those in the control group, who participated in online groups without models peer. Young said the participants found that the community is a safe place to communicate, and some online relationships continued after the trial concluded.
Young notes that these studies suggest social media have great potential to drive behavior change. "If the correct psychological fundamentals are applied to an intervention of social media, then it will have an impact on behavior," he said. "We should take advantage of existing platforms that have proven to cause change and behavior cause fairly quickly and instantly has access to billions of people. "
Jacqueline Lloyd, deputy head of the branch to the National Institute of drug abuse of the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, said the study is Young one of 11 funded as part of a program to use social media for understanding and treating drug use and addiction. the intervention of HOPE, she said, has "the potential to inform how social media and new technologies can be leveraged to provide a low cost, new interventions to prevent prescription opioid abuse and overdose. "
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