What is biomedical literacy, and how does this term affect our daily lives?

Answer 1

Enormously. About 30 years ago, biomedical literacy was pretty low among the majority of people. The public accepted paternalism in medicine and science. What I mean by paternalism is that people let the doctor tell them or not tell them if there was something medically wrong. They expected the doctor to plan some treatment for them without expecting them to decide from among different choices. Sometimes doctors would make decisions that seem awful today but the public accepted these decisions because they lacked biomedical literacy and felt intimidated by the difference between what they knew about their own bodies and what they believed the doctor knew.

Today, our culture has progressed and medicine is much less paternalistic. For example, when I was in my residency training in 1970 the standard of care for breast cancer was to do a radical mastecomy (remove the entire breast that contained the tumor), dissect away the draining lymph nodes and even remove some of the chest muscles. There were no alternative ways of surgically treating breast cancer. X-ray therapy was supplementary treatment and there were no specific chemotherapies that could be substituted for surgery or X-ray therapy.

After Dr. Baker did a study to see if lumpectomy, simple mastectomy and various versions of radical mastectomy were equal to each other, he found that there were alternative ways of treating breast cancer and the patient could decide from among these alternatives.

The ability to give to the patient the choice of therapies shows respect for their person, allows autonomy of choice and ends arbitrary practices that may be unpleasant, disfiguring and possibly not better than other choices.

This change in the way medicine is practiced requires that people who would become patients know enough about their bodies and about diseases they may encounter to be able to make sound choices. This is what I believe the questioner means by biomedical literacy.

The scientific and medical professions now have a moral obligation to remove the mystery of what they do by giving the public information to expand their biomedical literacy and this information must be in a form that the public can generally understand.

During the period of medical paternalism, medical terminology was a sort of mysterious language, understood only by members of the medical fraternity. There were lay language counterparts to many of the ~50,000 new words but using them would not allow doctors to talk about the patient's condition in front of him without him knowing what was said.

Today, the patient is part of the dialogue. And, by being engaged in understanding his illness and its consequences he or she will be more committed to doing what must be done to recover and stay healthy.

I believe we have all benefitted by removing medicine from a priestly status into the true care giver profession it has always needed to be.

Answer 2

this means knowing a bit about biomedical things so that you can discuss and understand them. sounds like you are asking a homework question and you can't do that until you acquire some BL of your own I'm afraid.

Answer 3

i'll keep this short

http://www.biocomm.northwestern.edu/content_frame_index.htm

go there