I feel a post I write is more worthwhile if I get comments from you both – it’s my version of Google-juice – epatient-juice perhaps?

I like the question and the answer, from “what do we do for people who don’t want to be educated?” to “what do we do for people who do want to be educated?” I think this is transition that you are helping to create, through the understanding that a lot more people want to be engaged than we think.

It brought to mind this, which I just ran across for an upcoming blog post:

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” – Hellen Keller

We are now able to stop looking at the closed door. Isn’t that great!

Ted

of course it’s about education! You cannot change deeply help cultural views about health without a big dose of education.

We are older people and basically know how to communicate with the older crowd. The people ACOR helps are mostly over 50 and it shows in the way they write and communicate with one another.

But in truth we don’t know what type of educational resources will be most effective with the younger crowd, those who have always lived with the Internet and who are not wowed by it. I know that, today, it must be on YouTube and Facebook. But what should be the content? A mystery that we should investigate before we launch the badly needed educational arm of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

And Gilles, as usual you take it to a deeper level, a much deeper level. You are one of the very few who see it a generation further into the future.

So let me ask you – what if people don’t WANT health literacy? Same as if they don’t want democracy?

To me the answer is, once again, education – teaching people what they need to know, including the consequences of one’s choices.

Thanks again, Ted.

You bet there is something I want to add:-)
You raise a important point that has been on my radar for years. Participation in your care is, I believe, one of the most important things you can do to yourself. But in order to participate you must have a level of health literacy sufficient to help you make sense of what you’ll read from classic “authoritative” sources, health communities, blogs or any other source of information. My friend Bruce Shriver just wrote a very short article that describes well the problem “A Dilemma for the Informed Patient“.

Because Participatory Medicine IS democratization of medicine, it is not surprising that the problem is akin to developing democratic behavior and institutions in countries that have always be rules by theocracies, dictatorships or other forms of absolute power grabbing.

As George W. Bush demonstrated so well, you can’t force democracy on a population. Just as we won’t be able to force the growth of PM if the population doesn’t get educated about the central necessity of health literacy.