Many lack the skills to make good health decisions
November 10, 2009 By Sheri Hall(PhysOrg.com) -- Some 93 million Americans do not have the numerical skills necessary to make well-informed decisions about their medical care, reports a Cornell professor, who has some suggestions on changing that.
Patients in medical offices should be screened for how well developed their numerical skills are to weigh their medical options, reports a new Cornell study.
Americans are bombarded with information about their personal health care, from ads for medications to articles on the Internet and data from their doctors, notes Valerie Reyna, professor of human development at Cornell. Yet, she says, studies indicate that more than 93 million people across the United States do not have the numerical skills necessary to make well-informed decisions about their medical care.
Reyna is the lead author of a paper published in the November issue of Psychological Bulletin that reviews the research on so called "health numeracy," the ability to understand and use numerical information related to health behaviors and medical outcomes.
The researchers recommend that interventions be developed to help those at high risk for using inaccurate information to make health decisions, that the health care system adopt strategies to address the problem of low health numeracy and that better communications materials be developed to benefit all patients regardless of their health numeracy level.
"What amazed me is how much medical decision-making goes beyond just literacy," Reyna said. "If you're a cancer patient making decisions, a lot of the confusing information and the life-or-death information is numerical."
Misguided decisions not only can impact patients' health but also can lead patients to use health care services they don't need or to miss out on treatments that would prevent disease or further complications. Both under- and overutilization of health care services ultimately drive up costs across the system and lead to misspent health care dollars, Reyna explained.
The issue is an important one because patients' ability to comprehend numbers affects nearly every aspect of their health care, including which services they use, whether they follow recommended therapies and, ultimately, their quality of life.
Health numeracy could become a new frontier in revamping of the U.S. health care system. That's because patients now have more decision-making responsibilities than ever before, Reyna said.
"The burden is on the patient to really understand all of this information, to a degree that's never been true in history before," she said. "We're not going to go back. People are empowered now. They want to make their own decisions."
There's also more medical research being published. "You have multiple drugs for the same disease, and you have multiple surgical options," Reyna said. "As the amount of available information increases, we have more and more options. It is a terrific opportunity and a terrific burden."
Researchers need to fine-tune the instruments they use to measure numeracy, stress Reyna and her co-authors -- Wendy Nelson and Paul Han at the National Cancer Institute and Nathan Dieckmann of the University of Oregon -- and look more carefully at how patients and doctors make decisions in clinical settings, instead of simply extrapolating more general studies on the topic.
-
New federal health care standards set
Aug 07, 2006 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Web-based program could ease treatment decisions for prostate cancer patients
May 15, 2007 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Limited resources, unlimited needs: Americans should ration health care, says MSU ethicist
Mar 10, 2009 |
not rated yet |
0
-
How do doctors really feel about surrogate decision making?
Sep 08, 2009 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Health information not communicated well to minority populations, researcher finds
Oct 30, 2009 |
not rated yet |
0
-
Engineers build first sub-10-nm carbon nanotube transistor
Feb 01, 2012 |
4.9 / 5 (31) |
30
-
Something old, something new: Evolution and the structural divergence of duplicate genes
Jan 31, 2012 |
4.6 / 5 (7) |
1
-
The hidden nanoworld of ice crystals: Revealing the dynamic behavior of quasi-liquid layers
Jan 30, 2012 |
5 / 5 (3) |
1
-
Stock market network reveals investor clustering
Jan 27, 2012 |
3.9 / 5 (23) |
8
-
Of microchemistry and molecules: Electronic microfluidic device synthesizes biocompatible probes
Jan 26, 2012 |
5 / 5 (1) |
0
-
Classical and Quantum Mechanics via Lie algebras
Apr 15, 2011
- More from Physics Forums - Independent Research
More news stories
FDA-approved drug rapidly clears amyloid from the brain, reverses Alzheimer's symptoms in mice
Neuroscientists at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have made a dramatic breakthrough in their efforts to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease. The researchers' findings, published in the journal Science, show t ...
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Feb 09, 2012 |
4.9 / 5 (53) |
21
|
Green tea found to reduce disability in the elderly
(Medical Xpress) -- A lot of research has been done over the past several years looking into the health benefits of green tea. As a result, scientists have found that regular consumption of the beverage leads ...
Teen school drop-outs three times as likely to be on benefits in later life
Teen school drop-outs are almost three times as likely to be on benefits in later life as their peers who complete their schooling, indicates research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Feb 06, 2012 |
not rated yet |
13
To perform with less effort, practice beyond perfection
Whether you are an athlete, a musician or a stroke patient learning to walk again, practice can make perfect, but more practice may make you more efficient, according to a surprising new University of Colorado Boulder study.
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Feb 09, 2012 |
4.4 / 5 (15) |
6
|
Anyone can learn to be more inventive, cognitive researcher says
There will always be a wild and unpredictable quality to creativity and invention, says Anthony McCaffrey, a cognitive psychology researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, because an "Aha moment" is rare and ...
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
Feb 09, 2012 |
4.6 / 5 (11) |
5
|
Google might launch Drive for cloud storage soon
(PhysOrg.com) -- Google's next big move, according to the Wall Street Journal, is a cloud storage service called Drive. Hardly first to the plate, Google is simply catching up to introducing its cloud reposi ...
Latin America mining boom clashes with conservation
Latin America is experiencing a mining boom as prices rise fuelled by a hike in global demand, but the region is also being hit by a wave of violent protests, strikes and rallies by environmentalists.
Love a click away in Indonesia's Twitter Republic
He was a geeky kid from Yogyakarta, she a glamorous city girl in Jakarta. In a country with one of the world's most vibrant social networking scenes they fell in love on Twitter.
Europeans protest controversial Internet pact
Tens of thousands of people marched in protests in more than a dozen European cities Saturday against a controversial anti-online piracy pact that critics say could curtail Internet freedom.
Walney offshore wind farm is world's biggest (for now)
(PhysOrg.com) -- The Walney wind farm on the Irish Sea--characterized by high tides, waves and windy weather--officially opened this week. The farm is treated in the press as a very big deal as the Walney ...
Navy to begin tests on electromagnetic railgun prototype launcher
The Office of Naval Research (ONR)'s Electromagnetic (EM) Railgun program will take an important step forward in the coming weeks when the first industry railgun prototype launcher is tested at a facility ...