Alex Thomas MDand Gary Ashwal MA are co-founders of Booster Shot Media. Alex is a board-certified pediatric allergist/immunologist and a cartoonist/illustrator with more than 20 years’ experience. Gary is a health communication specialist and multimedia producer of healthcare content. With 15+ years of creative partnership, Alex and Gary apply their combined experience to produce comic books, animation, and other visual projects to teach people of all ages about complex health topics.
In this podcast, Helen Osborne talks with Alex Thomas and Gary Ashwal about:
- Communicating in non-traditional ways as with comics, animation, and whiteboards
- Examples of using visual metaphors to help explain complex medical concepts
- Tips for creating and using visual teaching tools in your healthcare practice
More Ways to Learn:
- Visit Booster Shot Media’s website to see examples of their work, boostershotmedia.com
- See visual metaphors applied to asthma education comic books and videos atiggyandtheinhalers.com
- Read Gary and Alex’s commentary in AMA Journal of Ethics “Are Comic Books Appropriate Health Education Formats to Offer Adult Patients?” athttp://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/2018/02/ecas1-1802.html
- Read commentary by BSM collaborators in GENETICS in MEDICINE “Metaphors matter: from biobank to a library of medical information” athttps://www.nature.com/articles/gim2017204
- Read “Evaluation of a School-Based Asthma Education Protocol: Iggy and the Inhalers” in The Journal of School Nursing athttp://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1059840516659912
- Listen to Helen’s Health Literacy Out Loud podcast interview with MK Czerwiec, “Comics and Medicine: That’s Health Literacy, Too (HLOL #100),” /2014/02/18/comics-and-medicine-thats-health-literacy-too-hlol-110/
- Read Helen’s Health Literacy Consulting How-To Tip, “Metaphors and Analogies: They’re Like What You Already Know,” https://healthliteracy.com/2018/03/01/metaphors-and-analogies-theyre-like-what-you-already-know/
Health Literacy from A to Z: Practical Ways to Communicate Your Health Message, Second Edition (Updated 2018), by Helen Osborne. Relevant chapters include: 14, 16, 25, 28, 31, 38, 42
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