Healthcare Literacy for Consumers

The Doctor-patient communication is a sensitive phenomenon, and has huge impact on patient satisfaction and patient outcomes. Te patient should trust the doctor’s judgment and communicate with doctor in case of any problem instead of consulting with other people and getting information from internet. There’s danger in trusting data over people, as there is in thinking the expertise of all people is equivalent. When it comes to health, digital natives may not be learning how to navigate effectively. And the consequences could be harmful The medical profession itself, under managed care, has played a role as well, providing less time for doctor-patient interactions and undermining the chances that a personal relationship and trust can develop. Under the guise of efficiency, medical test results are now often released directly to patients, sometimes before or even without the benefit of any interpretation.

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The availability of enormous amounts of information on the internet tends to act as an impediment in the process, regardless of the reliability of the source of information. There’s also a lot of misleading information, and information that’s flat out untrue. The internet is full of people selling things, supplements, treatment regimens that have not been rigorously tested, even prescription medications, and making false promises that have not been scrutinized by regulatory agencies. Sometimes, as in the case of “pro-ana” websites that promote “an anorexic diet” for “aggressive” weight loss, the information can encourage life-threatening behavior

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Patient education has great impact on the doctor patient relationship. Because well-educated people think they are immune from the risks of misinformation. But they underestimate how the experience of illness can affect judgment. Judgment is also indispensable, especially in complex situations, and the capacity for good judgment rests within people, not data sets. Similarly, personal anecdotes of experiences with a particular drug or other form of treatment may have little relevance to whether that treatment fits another person. I want professionals whose education, training and actual experience I can trust. Then, after forcing myself to ask all my questions, even the embarrassing ones; patient’s aim to trust doctors’ judgment, and their interpretation of the research and data in their field. Satisfied patients typically don’t bother to post feedback about their doctors online; dissatisfied ones are more motivated to post complaints. But those complaints may or may not accurately reflect whether the patients actually got treatment that was right for them.