Literacy, both in the traditional sense of being able to read and our expanded sense encompassing virtually all technical skills and knowledge, plays a vital role in receiving medical care. At the most basic level, knowing about anatomy and basic health maintenance is crucial. For most of us, getting our teeth cleaned periodically and making at least a gesture towards exercise and eating healthy are ingrained, but they are learned behaviors. Once one enters the clutches of the medical system, both literal and expanded literacy are essential because of the reams of highly technical, both medically and legally, paperwork one must handle to receive, authorize, understand and pay for care. If one lacks the medical literacy to understand one's body and conditions, the literal literacy to understand the forms and paperwork, and the computer and research literacy to investigate, one is at the mercy of what information one overworked doctor can convey in brief, expensive face-to-face meetings.
Although I wasn't thinking in terms of Literacy per se, I witnessed the importance of medical and standard literacy last year when I was teaching in Namibia. Namibia is a new and impoverished country, having only won independence from Apartheid South Africa 20 years ago. It is also ground zero, along with neighboring Botswana, of the AIDS Crisis. AIDS medications are finally becoming available in the developing world, but taking AIDS "cocktails" properly and effectively is a very complicated and time-sensitive business, with a myriad of pills required at very specific times of day. How does this work in a country virtually without clocks, where time is vague to the point of near meaninglessness, and where people aren't accustomed to working with precision measuring and details? Where most people can't read in any language, much less the English formal instructions are almost always printed in? In rural Namibia (everywhere but the capital Windhoek), pill dosage instructions aren't given by the numerical clock (take two pills at 6am, and another two at 6pm) but with pictures: Take two pills when the sun is low in the sky! For some medication this may work, but for complicated and highly precise regimens it poses a huge obstacle.
That is interesting, and something I have never even considered! The fact that prescription instructions are not translated for other languages? I agree with your post that the entire realm of the medical field has its own set of literary skills, and those of us who are not doctors overlook all that goes on behind the scenes and all the information, research, skills, etc. that our doctors live by... we just go in get a diagnosis, some meds, and go home and sleep... Most of us not wondering, how they were able to diagnose us, under what criteria? How do they know what meds will help, which ones wont react with ones are already taking, etc. You post also gets me thinking just about some general medical and body-literacy most of us do have though that we dont even really realize, like being able to self diagnose things like headaches, fevers, the flu, how to know when we need stiches or a cast! These are all things we develop as knowledge that eventually comes natural to us non-medical professionals as well!
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. What would we do if we didn't have access to professionals and books and experienced parents when our children had the symptoms of a typical ear infection? We wouldn't know if it was a normal childhood nuisance or if the world was ending.
ReplyDeleteNow that's "reading the world"!
ReplyDeleteHave you seen the movie Babies? I highly recommend it if you like to see the irony (and folly) of parenthood in the U.S. compared to other cultures. Actually, I think there's a lot of folly in the way Japanese parents raise their kids, too, (at least in Tokyo), but I'll let you decide for yourself if you see the film (a documentary).