OCTOBER is Health Literacy Month!!!

October brings to mind Halloween, my mom's birthday, and Breast Cancer awareness month. I never knew October was Health Literacy Month until I was researching it for the workshop that I gave! There is even a website called healthlteracymonth.org!! It Health Literacy is such a vitally important issue today, especially in light of the health care debate and all of the efforts to lower health care costs, because health literacy costs the system millions in the long run simply because people are either uninformed, do not understand how to manage their health, or wait to the very last minute for treament to the point that radical and expensive measures need to be taken. Anyways, health literacy is especially important at San Jose, which I have stated before, sees a large indigant patient population who are Spanish speakers. I was shadowing a physician the other day at the Cizic Eye Institute and I sat in on two exams that were entirely in Spanish. All I understood was "insulin," "testosterone," the number "five"...and that was about it. I tried to pay attention to infliction and facial expression--but that definitely is not going to cut it. After the exam, the doctor asked me if I knew Spanish. He was quick to tell me what I already knew: I need to learn it, and fast! Anyhow, I decided to write this post about Health Literacy Awareness yet again because it is the cause's month AND I got very excited not to be the only one who seems to know: When I went to my interview at UT-San Antonio last week, it was in the library. And right there, as I was anxiously awaiting my second interview, I found myself face to face with a health literacy poster that had a huge mind-map depicting how it truly influences a great deal of medicine and quality of care and how it actually affects us ALL despite what our own level of health literacy might be. I was so excited that when the interviewer asked me how my day was so far, that was the first thing I told him!