If You Don’t Understand It, It Doesn’t Matter

Sometimes numbers can help, but they also can harm.  Take this statistic for example.  According to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), “nearly half of all American adults (90 million people) have difficulty understanding and using health information.”  While this is a shocking figure, the sheer enormity of the problem can sometimes cause our eyes to glaze over.  How about we make the problem more immediate.

There are many health myths floating around that are causing people harm.  Following are two that I’ve encountered in the past:

-Some people believe that cancer is contagious, which prevents them from seeking help or providing support and care to those stricken by the disease

-Others think you can tell if someone has high blood pressure by looking at them

Now, I am not citing these myths to poke fun at people.  Rather, I’m doing it to illustrate that the health literacy problem goes deeper than many realize. Clearly, it is hard to properly educate people about their health if they don’t understand what is being communicated to them.  In addition, inadequate health literacy adds to the nation’s health care bill.  The IOM has noted that “limited health literacy may lead to billions of dollars in avoidable health care costs.”

While public and private organizations have focused on health literacy in the past, a lot more can be done.  Fortunately, there’s hope.  Over the years, I’ve learned about a number of local, home-grown solutions to the health literacy problem.  Now, via the Change Now 4 Health initiative, we’ve got an opportunity to highlight these ideas so that people around the country can learn from and implement them.  To that end, I'd like to invite comments from readers on this subject.  Please leave them in the space provided below (click add a comment).  We’ll be expanding this effort in the weeks to come, but I’d like to jump start the process.  Please feel free to comment on this issue in the space provided (the comment boxes).  I’ll check back periodically to see how the conversation is going and will highlight interesting parts of the conversation on the main blog. 

Let’s beat back health illiteracy. Because if you don’t understand it, it doesn’t matter. 

Image Source: Health Literacy Innovations