Health literacy: from the “Angelina Jolie” effect to meaningful strategies
In a world where patients and consumers are pushed and incentivized to commercially exploit their medical data, the ability to understand the nature and value of the medical data and the implications of their commercial use is under the microscope.
At the same time, an incident in the Hollywood world came to teach us that the way these strategies are being designed needs to be updated. Some years ago, the famous actress and activist, Angelina Jolie, publicized her personal story of her family’s fight with cancer. This action had a significant effect on public health and health literacy. According to the data presented at the European Health Forum´s Gastein Workshop on Health Literacy and Personalised Medicine, on referral data specific to breast cancer family history 2012 versus 2013, there was a rise in referrals from May 2013 onwards, an increase in the inquiries for risk-reducing mastectomy with no increase in inappropriate referrals.
At the same time as the healthcare community argues that “the new language of medicine is genomics”, my question is how can talk about the new language if there are so many of us who are still lost in translation with the old one?
Read more insights from the workshop on European Health Forum Gastein blog clicking here.
#EHFG2018 #YFG2018
