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| Trouble Understanding Or Evaluating Medical Information Creates A Risk To Your Health
In previous articles I have alluded to the difficulties that physicians have in keeping up with the immensely burgeoning changes in their field. Glasziou, Bain, and Colditz decided to help doctors overcome these difficulties by providing ways to negotiate the growing maze of clinical studies in a book published by the Cambridge University Press in December of 2001 called "Systematic Reviews in Health Care: A Practical Guide." Noting that the "practice of medicine is rapidly shifting from an art to a science", in his review of the book, Hamdy went on to denote the difficulties inherent in this shift by stating, "Evidence-based medicine is rapidly gaining ground. But how strong is the evidence? Does the evidence presented apply to a particular clinician's patient population? Can the clinician reasonably extrapolate the findings of a study to the patient in the office?"
/> Physicians have only so many hours available to put aside for going over the literature, or for spending time with pharmaceutical company representatives. Information learned may be sketchy with distractions creating confusion. Worse yet they may not even really understand everything in an article, especially statistical jargon. This book is an attempt to provide physicians with the tools for comprehending and evaluating articles so that they would no longer need someone else to interpret the material, and perhaps color it to suit their own concepts. The book is only 100 pages long, but frankly, if a doctor does not have sufficient time to spend keeping up with medical articles, why would there be enough time to read even a relatively short 100-page book? In the end, I suspect that most individuals would still be tempted to rely on an intermediary reviewer, especially since there may really be an advantage to having the material subjected to critical analysis by an expert reviewer.
If your doctor has difficulty understanding and keeping up with the latest in his or her field, what about you, the patient? This question was the subject of a Roper ASW survey conducted on behalf of Pfizer, Inc. whose results were described in an article published in the Health News Digest for 9/23/02 titled "Inability to Understand Medical Information. Study Links Patients' Inability to Understand Medical Information to Poor Health Outcomes." Some amazing figures were derived such as "75 percent of patients, physicians and pharmacists say the inability to understand information about prescription medications contributes to poor health outcomes ": "One-third of patients and two-thirds of physicians polled said they know of someone who has had health problems because they did not understand how to correctly take a prescription medication": And "low health literacy, affects the health of 90 million Americans and is estimated to cost the health care system tens of billions of dollars annually."
Pharmacists tend to agree with estimates made by physicians. As many as 90% of physicians and pharmacists indicated that most patients have had experiences of apparently first understanding and later failing to recall what to do with their medication.
All this leads to trouble. The study found that patients who have difficulty reading are at a 52 percent greater risk to end up in the hospital.
If you think about it for a moment, the ability to read medical information is only one element of the problem. Just because someone is capable of reading the material does not preclude the need to also understand what is being read, interpret the information appropriately with respect to the specific condition to which it is to be applied, and to then properly carry out the procedures required for maximal therapeutic efficacy. How certain are you that you and your physician are capable of maintaining these requirements throughout the course of your medical treatment?
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Be sure to remember Mr. Hill,
If you can't go, take the blue pill,
One after meals, one before bed,
Unless you'd rather eat prunes instead.
But should your belly start to ache,
Your arms and legs begin to quake,
Quickly swallow the antidote,
Carefully stirred in milk from a goat.
Now if you have some memory loss,
And then your eyes begin to cross,
Lie down on the floor or on the bed,
But first call 911 and yell, "Code Red".
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Cartoons and Poems following each article are created and copyrighted by Dr. Ackerman and cannot be copied or reproduced without his permission.
Copyright © 2006 by Marvin Ackerman, M.D.
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Relax! It’s Only Your Doctor’s Waiting Room, Not the ER: Or How to Get Along With and Understand Your Doctor is an insightful but irreverent intrusion into the complexities of modern day medicine. Listen to an interview with Dr. Ackerman
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