In the family of former relationship talk show host JoAnne Hart-Rogers, more popularly known as Mother Love, diabetes was lightheartedly downplayed as "just a little sugar." But after her diagnosis with the disease in 1990, the woman known for making audiences laugh knew it was time to pay attention. "I decided I didn't want to be dead," she said.
Now, she is taking that same mix of humor and frankness to a new forum: "dLife: For Your Diabetes Life," a new talk show for and about people with diabetes.
The weekly show is being marketed as "medutainment" -- a form of entertainment designed primarily to convey medical information. As the first talk show to focus solely on diabetes, "dLife" has a huge potential audience: 13 million U.S. adults and children who have the disease and 5.2 million still undiagnosed. Practically all hosts and guests on "dLife" have diabetes, as do studio audience members, and they all check their blood sugar levels right in the New York studio.
It's a new take on the idea of using television shows, movies, and computer and video games to educate consumers by engaging and amusing them.
There have long been efforts to tailor video games to children with chronic illnesses like diabetes and asthma, but sponsors' interest and development of these projects have increased with new technologies. Some Web sites and such new kids' DVDs as "Escape from Obeez City" have made their content interactive to teach people healthy habits.
The talk show is meant to give people with diabetes advice over and above what they get from their doctors. "They're not getting [enough of] it through the health care system, [but] they can get it through media," said dLife's president and CEO Howard Steinberg, a veteran of the advertising and marketing industries who has type 1 diabetes. "A lot of people are coming back to us and saying, 'Thank you. I don't feel so lonely anymore.' "
Some nonprofit groups collaborate with media firms to create entertainment that delivers health messages. Other ventures, like dLife -- a division of Connecticut-based LifeMed Marketing -- are commercial enterprises that produce programs and sell advertising and sponsorships to groups that want to reach people with a particular disease or condition.
The use of entertainment to convey health messages has "increased markedly" in recent years, according to the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). The foundation studies a concept known by several names -- edutainment, infotainment and entertainment education -- on which dLife's medutainment format puts a new spin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Entertainment Education Program reports that 88 percent of Americans learn about health issues from television/
Victoria Rideout, vice president and director of a program to study entertainment media and health at KFF, said that entertainment education serves an important purpose at a time when Americans spend many hours watching TV and playing video games.
"When information is included in entertainment media, it can address issues in a way that a pamphlet cannot," said Rideout. KFF collaborates with producers to integrate health messages into TV shows like "ER" and on cable channels such as MTV and Black Entertainment Television.
Game Plan
Eileen O'Neill, senior vice president and general manager at Discovery Health Channel, said that about 50 to 60 percent of the channel's programming is edutainment. Many such shows have a reality-TV feel, such as "Plastic Surgery: Before & After," which features real patients before, during and after cosmetic surgery. Unlike newer forms of medutainment, Discovery programs are more documentary in nature, and the channel covers a range of personal health topics, rather than one specific disease or condition.
