Side Effects? These #Drugs Have a Few - NYTimes.com

Dr. Jon Duke of Indiana University was trying to figure out why his patient’s blood platelets were abnormal. Could it be a side effect of one of the dozen drugs the man was taking, a number that is not uncommon among elderly people?

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Mark Pernice/Ashley Nodar

He began reading the label of each and every drug. “I was just overwhelmed,” Dr. Duke said. The lists of possible adverse reactions went on and on.

Now he knows why. In a new paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. Duke and two colleagues report that the average drug label lists 70 possible side effects and some drugs list more than 500. “This was beyond even what I’d expected,” he said.

For anyone who has ever had to watch an entire Flomax commercial, the listing of a drug’s side effects is almost a joke. But the question is, why does the list continue to grow?

via nytimes.com

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Many paid caregivers lack health literacy skills :: May 4, 2011 ... American Medical News

More than a third of the people paid to care for seniors are not health literate, and 60% wrongly interpret the instructions on prescription labels, a study says.

Caregivers often are hired by families to help care for seniors with cognitive loss, dementia or Alzheimer's disease and who have trouble performing daily activities such as toileting, bathing, cooking and shopping. This makes it especially important that caregivers have the ability to understand health-related instructions, said Lee A. Lindquist, MD, MPH, lead author of the study published in May's Journal of General Internal Medicine (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21161420/).

Caregivers' poor health literacy skills can affect patient care, said Dr. Lindquist, a geriatrician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

via ama-assn.org

See also:

Death By Handwriting, By Maureen Glabman, Trustee Magazine :"Most Americans don't receive any formal handwriting instruction beyond the third grade, so how we learned to write then is more or less what we are stuck with for the rest of our lives. It's a worn joke that when someone writes poorly, we tell him he could be a doctor. But a medical error due to misinterpretation of illegible writing is no laughing matter--and for physicians it is a major threat to patient safety. The Joint Commission does not know precisely how often hospitals are reproached for handwriting deficiencies, but the problem is believed to be substantial. "The Joint Commission almost always finds instances where handwriting is of poor quality," says Peter Angood, M.D., JCAHO vice president and chief patient safety officer. The standard that encompasses handwriting legibility also includes stipulations that medical records be dated, that patients be identified and that diagnoses are supported, among other requirements, so it is difficult to sort out individual deficiencies."
http://www.trusteemag.com/trusteemag_app/jsp/articledisplay.jsp?dcrpath=TRUST.../PubsNewsArticleGen/data/2005/0510TRU_FEA_Handwriting

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How podcasts can help patients with health literacy, KevinMD.com

by Robert Rodvien, MD

When a person is told that they have a serious illness, they are similar to Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

They enter a bewildering new world of discussions, tests and treatment programs that must be navigated while maintaining a job, life obligations, and relationships with friends and family. Just when a person needs more resilience to stress, anxiety can occur. The ability to function is often diminished in such a state, and, like Alice, many begin to grope for solutions. Patients, family members and friends begin to rely on anecdotes. Others find hope-based messages more acceptable than evidence-based ones. Some patients are willing to do anything that appears constructive even if there is no evidence of success.

Some patients seek to become experts in their field of illness and venture on-line to do so, but entering the world of medicine on-line often creates misguided but nonetheless strongly held beliefs. Much of the accessible material is jargon and advertising rather than unbiased information. Web sites and brochures are rife with marketing language to promote a hospital, company or pharmaceutical product, leaving many who seek information as wary consumers instead of informed patients.

via kevinmd.com

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Presentation Cites Ways to Counteract Low Health Literacy | National Nursing News

Although low health literacy is a significant barrier to quality care, especially among elderly patients, a recent presentation noted how increased use of simple health literacy assessment tests by nurses and clinicians can help improve communication and health outcomes.

Several screening tools are available to assess health literacy but are underutilized, according to a presentation at the 36th Annual Congress of the Oncology Nursing Society by Ellen C. Mullen, RN, ANP-BC, GNP-BC, nurse practitioner in the Lymphoma and Myeloma Center at The University of MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Furthermore, nurses and other health professionals routinely underestimate the prevalence of limited health literacy — the degree to which an individual can obtain, process and understand health information needed to make appropriate health decisions — and overestimate patients’ ability to understand medical information.

via news.nurse.com

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