A public outreach in epilepsy surgery using a serial novel on BLOG: a preliminary report

BLOG (Web Log) is a new internet media system characterized by a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts with multiple Web links. The author investigated whether a 'fiction novel' on BLOG describing a girl undergoing epilepsy surgery can potentially facilitate familiarity to epilepsy surgery among the general internet users in Japan. The BLOG was initiated on July 13, 2005 and obtained daily public accesses ranging about 80-500 without any external funding support. The survey was conducted on the BLOG from November 28 until December 4, 2005. The mean of daily accesses during the survey period was 135, and a total of 27 users responded to a single questionnaire. Sixteen responders indicated that this novel facilitated awareness of epilepsy surgery, and eight indicated that they have been aware of epilepsy surgery even before reading the novel. The author found that advantages of BLOG as a tool for outreach and survey included a small cost and high speediness, whereas major limitations of BLOG-based surveys included limited coverage and severe non-response bias. A public outreach in epilepsy surgery might be possible using BLOG, but the magnitude of public outreach in this project has been quite small. A better outreach system may be required to increase the number of patients with uncontrolled seizures benefiting from epilepsy surgery.