Glossary for Consumer Health

Here are some terms that I feel are useful to know for considering consumer health issues:

1) professional discourse: how "things" - issues, decisions, solutions, etc are discussed within a profession. For example, let's think about professional discourse about whether people should have access to information about what's in our food products. If people in my field decide that we believe consumers are too ready to be afraid of what they don't understand, we might decide that labeling foods with "Contains GM ingredients" might do more harm than good by causing folks to stop buying canned vegetables because they don't want the GM ingredients - but aren't ready to take the step of a)paying more to buy organic canned vegetables or b)buying/cooking fresh vegetables. So they may end up eating NO vegetables. Again, this is what people in my field might SAY (discourse), leading them to support the government in deciding NOT to require labeling. Professional discourse has been shown to strongly affect what people in a profession DO and DON'T do to solve problems.

2) information gap: the idea that lower SES people have less access to adequate information, EVEN THOUGH there's tons of information out there. If I am barely supporting my family, working very long hours to do it, dropping to my couch every night, and would have trouble fitting in reading my local paper even a couple of times a week, I definitely do not get a lot of the information that many folks in society get much more easily.