[Week 1: Feb. 3-7] Blog Title Subject to Change

Annika here, I hope you've all been having a good week. Here's an update of what I've been up to. I started off this week wanting to find out if health literacy, someone's ability to navigate through a health care system, could be affected by his or her level of medical science education. I wanted to design an experiment to compare how groups of people would perform on various health literacy-related tasks before and after being taught pertinent medical science topics, but along the way, I ran into some problems, notably, how to organize a volunteer group. Experiments with volunteers tend to work better when there’re more volunteers, but the more people there are, the more difficult it is coordinate the whole group. I talked to my on-site adviser about it. I learned that my initial premise was flawed: health literacy isn’t that influenced by education.

Health literacy, as defined by the CDC, is “the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services to make appropriate health decisions,” so an example would be being able to read a prescription and take the appropriate drug dosage. Health literacy’s more similar to reading comprehension than to active engagement of patients in their own health.  My on-site adviser pointed me to another direction, which is similar to what I wanted to first look at. I’m looking at the “attitudes” in medicine where patients are supposed to be encouraged to get involved with their own health, while medical practice itself resembles a guild, which can discourage people who aren’t medical service providers from being engaged in their own health. So far, I’ve been doing a content analysis of talks given by Harvey Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine. Also, I was doing some reading and I stumbled across an article titled Guild Medicine, the editorial of the Annals of Surgery (1950): 132: 4. At this moment, my project’s shifted toward a history of science kind of focus. Things have been turning out differently than I how I expected, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing! Have a nice weekend, guys.

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CDC Quote from: Center of Disease Control. Accurate, Accessible and Actionable Health Information for All. CDC Website: http://www.cdc.gov/healthliteracy/