Jane Brody wrote an article in the January 30, 2007 issue of The New York Times discussing the topic of health literacy. Although she mentions that “health illiteracy” is pervasive because it affects many strata of our society, the misinterpretations she cites will not be rectified by plain language and point to a more fundamental problem. One example—“Medication Should Be Taken With Plenty of Water”—was misinterpreted to mean “Don’t take when wet” and “Don’t drink hot water.” These misinterpretations point to general illiteracy, not health illiteracy. Unfortunately, I suspect that the people who were confused by such simple instructions are barely able to function in any aspect of their lives. They must require assistance to travel, to drive, to work, to dine out, etc.

My concern is that by muddying the issues of general illiteracy and health illiteracy, the medical community will find that solutions are unattainable and give up too easily. If we set a standard of communication for health topics that aims too low, many projects will never make it to the marketplace because the standard will be unrealistic. If someone can’t understand the words, “plenty of water,” it is absurd to think that they will ever understand a written explanation of “a 3% chance of death or serious injury from surgery.” However, many literate, well-educated people cannot understand medical consent forms and would benefit from plain language explanations and innovative information design techniques. The two topics—general illiteracy and health illiteracy—need to be disentangled because the solutions are not the same.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 10:23 am and is filed under clarity, complexity, disclosure, information design, plain English, simplicity, simplification. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.