Metaverse Health

Archive for February, 2009

We’ve covered Karuna previously for their work with World AIDS Day 2008.

They’ve now made an open invitation to “HIV/AIDS groups, activists, health professionals, organizations, and educators” to get further involved in collaboration. If you’re interested:

Place: Karuna campfire
Date: March 6, 2009
Time: 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Second Life Time (Pacific Time)

Thanks to Mal Burns for the heads-up.

For further information on Karuna, check out their website

A yearly highlight in Second Life is the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. The 2007 and 2008 events were big successes, with more than 55 million Linden Dollars (approximately 200 thousand US dollars).

Teams have started forming and if any health-related teams are forming, do let us know and we’ll promote your fundraising efforts. The team registration form can be found here.

The Second Life version of the Relay achieves the same community vibe as the real-world one and it’s an opportunity to remember those lost to cancer, to support those currently fighting cancer and to help find more effective treatments for cancers.

Thanks to SL Entrepreneur Magazine for the heads-up.

Two snippets I’ve run across this week:

1. An interesting Second Life event:

The annual DREAMS Community Health, Education and Art Fair will be held from February the 15th through the 28th. This will be the 5th year for the fair at Dreams.

Each year the Dreams Community Fair is provided as an outreach program to connect & educate SL residents about support groups and their services with an emphasis on health related groups.

The fair is filled with group presentations; booths of information, SL related classes, live performances, talks and more!

The ever popular “Linden Dunk Tank Day” will return and is tentatively scheduled for Friday the 20th from 2pm to 6pm SLT

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dreams/133/163/26/

2. A useful article on health education and virtual worlds was featured in a 2008 issue of Telehealth World ezine (page 8). Better late than never mentioning this.

The usually tabloid Second Life Herald have an interesting but short interview with a Dutch hypnotherapist who conducts therapy in Second Life.

Of course, there’s nothing new about therapy in Second Life – our sister site The Metaverse Journal interviewed two counsellors back in March 2007 – you can read that interview here.

If you run any form of counselling in a virtual world, we’d love to hear from you.