Dr. John R. Finnegan

And so when they started these studies, they said, wait a minute, we don't know anything about communication.

So that's when people like me, and I'm more on the academic side, I was a journalist at one point, but I moved into the academic side of communication.

And that's how I actually got involved in public health, because people like me in the social and behavioral sciences were starting to flood into public health.

Well, that was, as I say, it was the analog era where things change is when we moved into the digital era of communication.

And that's when it became possible for people to isolate themselves in their little bubbles.

And, you know, you only listen to MSNBC or you only listen to the Fox News or Newsmax or whatever it is.

and um and it becomes almost cult-like in some way and anything outside of that bubble you don't necessarily see is true but to get back to where public health is the the the um i think people have taken a lot of things for granted um nobody sees pub or sees seat belts as public health anymore but public that saved an enormous number of lives every single day you know

And street lighting, I mean, simple things, street lighting.

We didn't have a uniform plumbing code in the United States until 1918, if you can imagine that.

So you had all kinds of diseases in cesspools and things of that kind.

All of this stuff is public health.

I know Dr. Baines and I were talking about this a little bit earlier.

What's the difference between medicine and public health?

Well, rather than focus on the difference, let's say we work together, but we work generally in different ends of a spectrum of supporting health.

And those of us in the public health side, and docs are in the public health side too, by the way,

They help with populations.

We look at a whole population, a whole state, a whole country, if you will.

And we look at what are the diseases everybody's suffering from?

What are the major things people are suffering from and so on?

Docs are very, are certainly into that, but they're also into providing the individual with care.