Wow, health illiteracy is a HUGE problem! The statistics were staggering - around 50% of the population has inadequate functional literacy. How scary and how sad! No wonder so many people end up with complications due to failure to comply with medications properly! Actually, I'm surprised that more people are not in the emergency room for such things after seeing that! The part about filling out forms without being about to read them was especially scary. Perhaps asking every single person who reports to a clinic for the first time if he/she can read and understand medical literature would be useful. Maybe not being able to read well or understand medical terminology would not be so stigmatizing if the person at the desk asked in a non-threatening way and normalized the inability to do so. Very trick, though...
Regarding what Danette wrote about in her blog, I have not personally interacted with such populations, but in my Cultural Psychology class last year we studied the Hmong culture's different view of illness, medicine, and healing. Also, I took a course called Religion, Health, and Healing as an undergrad and learned a lot about Shamans and other healers. While these different views do not have anything to do with literacy in the strictest sense (i.e., written word or math), they definitely affect the beholders' understanding of our Western health/medical system and, in effect, the part that they will play in their healthcare. The debate is whether to meet them where they are or to try to force our views of health and illness on them.
Anyway, regardless of all of these other cultural issues, we should definitely strive to make our language as simple and understandable as possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment