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.
