A story on UpstreamDownstream.org entitled Animation Works! really caught my attention today (pretty understandably, considering the work we do here at Health Nuts Media!)

Written by “Qians,” a Masters Candidate in Health Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the short post notes how animation can help “deliver important but abstruse messages” to people with low health literacy. He tells how a wonderful animation, The Story of Cholera, was used by a UNICEF development consultant to help villagers in a cholera-stricken West African community. After watching the video, even though they weren’t able to understand the English narration, the villagers were able to understand the key messages about cholera, sanitation, and what they could do to help stop the spread of this horrible infection.

The video is a masterpiece of healthcare animation! (more…)

Controlling diabetes – and keeping your organs safe from the damage it can cause – takes a strong dose of diabetes education. That, and following through on what you learn!

Diabetes, whether Type 1, Type 2, or Type 1.5 (also called LADA: Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults), can eventually affect every organ and organ system in your body. It is well known for targeting the eyes, feet (circulation), and kidneys. People with uncontrolled diabetes can lose their vision completely. They can lose their toes, feet, or legs from poor circulation. They can develop full blown kidney failure leading to the need for dialysis or kidney transplant.

Also well known are its effects upon nerves and blood vessels. Herein lies the universality of diabetes’ damage: there are no organs, no areas of the body which aren’t served by nerves and blood vessels. (more…)

The surprising sound nearly knocked the breath out of Health Nut Hal. He couldn’t believe how wonderfully deep and rich it was.

“Wow, Mr. Lincoln, that’s amazing!” shouted Hal in order to be heard above the lustrous music. “I never thought you’d get all those messed up parts and pieces together…not together enough to make something that powerful.”

Alfred Lincoln’s dirty head appeared from behind the massive organ. He grinned at Hal as he played a few more chords from Bach’s famous “Organ Toccata.” It was breathtakingly beautiful as it filled the church with its robust tones. The organ’s pipes seemed to dance with their renewed life.

Alfred lingered on a final note and then let the wind from the pipes fade slowly away before he said, “Yeah, this old baby has a lot more life left in her.” He patted the front side of the organ’s keyboard, almost lovingly. His gaze upon the old organ was just as gentle.

Hal said, “It’s really awesome how you could take (more…)

According to a report issued by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) earlier this year, “Addressing health literacy is critical to transforming health care quality. Goals for safe, patient-centered, and equitable care cannot be achieved if consumers cannot access services or make informed health care decisions.”

Dean Schillinger, MD, chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (SFGH), was the senior author for for the paper based upon a study run at SFGH and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Schillinger notes, “Depending on how you define it, nearly half the U.S. population has poor health literacy skills.”

The importance of adequate health literacy has been demonstrated by numerous clinical studies. Health literacy is directly linked to health. People who have sufficient understanding of health information (more…)

Here’s a simple question: Why have the worlds of healthcare and “medicine” always avoided making health fun?

Here’s a simple answer: Making health fun just ain’t easy. (Please pardon the “ain’t.”)

Think about it. The worlds of health, healthcare, and medicine have long been owned by the elite. Typically, in years past, it was only the rich or privileged who were able to get medical training. Historically, the elite in their ivory towers of medical knowledge didn’t write down their wisdom for the general public; they wrote “scholarly” papers designed to talk in big terms using big words to “big” people with big vocabularies (and, many times, with big heads.) “It’s complicated, so it must be discussed with big words and in long, dull documents,” they said. And that is where they stopped. And that has become medical tradition.

Well, they were right…sort of. Health and the workings of the human body are pretty darn complex. There’s a whole lotta stuff going on inside of each of us. There’s a lot of “this thing connected to that thing causing the other thing to do some different thing.” We’re pretty amazing creatures full of complicated “machinery.”

But those medical elitists were wrong, too. Complicated or not, every single one of us has “health” (more…)

If I could read, I probably wouldn’t have mixed up my prescriptions last month and ended up in the emergency room.

If I could read, I might be able to understand what my doctor wrote on my instructions when I last visited with her.

If I could read, all those papers that the pharmacist puts in with my prescriptions would probably mean something.

If I could read, I could use a computer and I could text with my friends and family instead of pretending “I just don’t like that stuff”. (more…)

So what does the phrase “Say, ah” have to do with health literacy? Well, according to the folks at non-profit Say Ah!, it’s related to “Open your mouth and say ‘Ah’” and “Ah, I understand now.”

I love the phrase, all big and bold on their home page: “Medicine is getting better every day, but dealing with it is getting harder.” How true!

Say Ah! is all about helping people understand health and healthcare issues. In other words, the Say Ah! folks seek to improve health literacy because they know that health literacy is “a stronger predictor of a person’s health than age, income, employment status, education level, and race.” (more…)

One factor that impacts the skyrocketing costs of healthcare is the rate of health literacy, or perhaps I should say, the incredibly low rate of health literacy. In the United States, only 12% of adults are considered to have “Proficient” health literacy. In other words, a full 88% of Americans are not sufficiently (more…)

Literacy: “An individual’s ability to read, write and speak…, and compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job and in society, to achieve one’s goals, and develop one’s knowledge and potential.”
- National Literacy Act of 1991

Health Literacy: “The degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health (more…)