Health Info / Literacy Resources

I’ve still got subscriptions to all the blogs and listservs and newsletters that I did before I was downsized. And I’ve been reading them and thinking: oh, that could be really useful for… and then realizing that, oh yeah, I was downsized. I’ve decided that, even though I don’t have a specific reason to file these things away anymore, I’m going to keep following them. I find them interesting, so why shouldn’t I? Anyway, here are some things I’ve been looking at recently:

• Graphic Medicine http://graphicmedicine.org/#/graphic-novels/4531705857 : interesting site, lists and describes graphic novels, web comics, manga, educational comics etc. that are either specifically about a specific health topic, or addressing a health related subject in the course of telling a larger story. Certainly not comprehensive, and several of the (especially older) books are inappropriate as items for a consumer health collection. The more recent biographical works could easily work, though; provide perspectives about the issue from people who’ve been there, reduce the sense of isolation, easier and requiring less energy / time to read than purely textual biographies.

• GATOR approach can help surfers to evaluate Web-based health information http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/w-gac052510.php : Article describing problems with using internet for health information (the usual: there’s bad info out there that people can use instead of medical consultation) and an acronym to help people remember what to look for when looking at health information on the internet.

• 12 Questions Empowered Patients Should Ask When Looking For A New Physician…Are You Ready? http://healthecommunications.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/what-if-patients-were-really-empowered/ : Posting from Mind the Gap (I love this blog) about how patients are and should be evaluating doctors, including list of 12 questions that it might not occur to a person to ask, but will provide important information about the way the doctor in question relates to and communicates with his or her patients. While many people here do not have the luxury of interviewing and selecting a doctor, the same questions could provide patients with ideas about what they are going to need to do to get information from their doctor(s), and empower themselves in making decisions about their health.

• Health Literacy Online; A Guide to Writing and Designing Easy-to-Use Health Web Sites http://www.health.gov/healthliteracyonline/index.htm : guide from Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) The title is pretty self explanatory. Guide includes strategies, references, other resources, etc. Also available as downloadable pdf.

• One view of e-patients : “What I’ve learned from e-patients” by Doc Tom and Dan Hoch http://e-patients.net/archives/2010/05/what-ive-learned-from-e-patients-doc-tom-and-dan-hoch-2005.html , and another less optimistic one: Untangling the Web — Patients, Doctors, and the Internet http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/362/12/1063 . The simplified halfway point is: people are different and what works for some people won’t for others. Of course it also an illustration of an older (the second) and a newer (the first) way of thinking about patients and health information.

Apologies for non-embedded addresses: LNG and my computer do not like each other very much.