Medical Disclaimer and the Changing World of Health Literacy
Recently, I placed a Medical Disclaimer on the home page of my Substack site in keeping with the standard practice to remind readers to use this site as an information gathering tool. Hopefully, this input helps you generate new ideas and approaches to discuss with your current healthcare providers to improve your sleep regimen.
While the concept of a Medical Disclaimer remains relevant in the 21st century, the broader concept of health literacy is changing so rapidly, I believe we are on the verge of a revolutionary transformation in how certain aspects of healthcare are delivered. We’ve already seen part of this change with the advent of the telehealth model during the pandemic.
Health literacy, a misnomer in my opinion, refers to the idea that individuals seek to gain insights into their health problems to the extent that they take action steps to better their health. Health literacy is fairly new terminology that originated despite the fact literacy only means whether or not you can read; the term itself says nothing about taking action steps. Correct terminology would use a phrase like Health Self-Efficacy, which would indicate a person’s willingness to deeply investigate their own health issues and attempt to demonstrate some control over them by changing behaviors or adopting new behaviors.
Classic health self-efficacy would be the individual who reads about all sorts of weight loss strategies and finds the right one for him or for her, and then adopts new tactics that over the course of time lead to successful loss of pounds. Moreover, with continued reading and thinking about weight issues, the individual maintains the new weight instead of bouncing up and down repeatedly.
I use the example of obesity, because so much in sleep medicine, whether it’s treating OSA/UARS or whether it’s treating insomnia requires tremendous input from you. When you dive into the workings of these disorders, you become a student of the condition, not only capable of solving your own sleep conditions but also assisting others such as friends and relatives in their use of, say, a PAP device or in implementing behavioral changes for decreasing insomnia.
Such scenarios are cropping up all over the internet and in other media, and one might ask whether this input is naturally expanding the boundaries of what was once called the territory of the Medical Disclaimer?
In my own experience in helping patients, the more self-efficacy I could promote, better results were achieved by these patients.
My growing sense is we are all looking for superior health knowledge for virtually every aspect of our own health conditions, and I believe the 21st century will see far greater expansion in how this knowledge is dispensed beyond the traditional medical encounters we have grown accustomed to in the 20th century.