This brings me to the reason I became interested in health literacy in the first place. Before I enrolled in med school last fall, I was a high school teacher for 2 years with Teach For America (http://www.teachforamerica.org/). TFA is an organization that recruits recent college graduates to teach in low-income schools for two years, with the goal of closing the achievement gap. Learning that only 1 in 10 children growing up in poverty will graduate from college, or that the average student in a low-income community performs as well as an eighth grader coming from a higher income area, made my blood boil.
After graduating from college, I moved to Houston, Texas where I taught ninth grade science at Jefferson Davis High School (see the picture of me in action in my classroom). About 90% of the students at Davis qualify for free or reduced lunch. Many of my students were several grade levels behind in math and reading. I also began noticing that my 15 year old students had health problems that I had thought were predominantly disease of older people - high blood pressure, cancer, type 2 diabetes. It was then that I started making the connection between poverty, education, and health, which put me on the path to medical school.
As a Teach For America alum and a medical student, I have a particular interest in the intersection between health care and education. Teaching my Health Literacy class this summer is bound to be an incredible experience. I can only hope that my students will learn as much from me as I know I will learn from them.
Re your request for ideas on how to make health literacy fascinating. Well I don't exactly have any ideas of my own, but I bet if you think back to your days in TFA, you would remember a lab or lesson you taught about science which engaged a class full of teenagers. Maybe you could use a similar lesson/game/idea to engage your new students.
ReplyDeleteQuestion: do you go by Ms. or Miss? Curious if you have strong feelings about that "title." Or if you do first names at this organization, what did you use in Texas when teaching?
ReplyDeleteTo play devil's advocate: what about people who have access to the information freely, but choose not to take advantage of it? i.e., they would rather not read it, or they want to continue to make life decisions contrary to their physical health?
Is perfect honesty always the best policy in health literacy? For example, many people have the attitude that it's OK to take more pills than suggested "to make the medicine work faster" or "I happen to have a REALLY bad headache."
Anon- thanks :) It's difficult because what engages ninth graders doesn't neccesarily transfer to middle aged people.
ReplyDeleteDancing Scientist, the teachers here go by their first names, but when I was in TX I went by Ms. (however, it was pronounced "Miss").
There are definitely people who continue to make decisions even though they know it is bad for them, but often it may be because they don't completely understand their situation. For example, a patient may stop taking their HIV meds because of the terrible side effects, stating "I know this medicine is supposed to help my HIV, but it's only making me sicker." I'm hoping that in my class, we will learn about the mechanism of the drugs so that they will have a deeper understanding of how the drugs work and thus be less likely to miss a dose.
I'm not really sure what you mean by your third question - are you suggesting that I should acknowledge that sometimes you can take medicine contrary to the instructions on the pill bottle?
This is a logic that some people might use:
ReplyDeleteGiven that people will act irresponsibly about the number of pills they can safely take (like how I wrote above), one should artificially lower the amount of pills a person should take. Maybe the medical optimum value is 4, but, to account of irrationality of people, make it 2.
For example, people sometimes take 1 or 2 more pills than whatever the bottle says IS the limit, because they "need it" in their minds. I could imagine a doctor concluding that they should recommend 1 or 2 less pills for dosage to circumvent this.
I'm not saying I support this idea, but I can't help but consider it in light of my parents (who do this regularly).
Each individual processes drugs differently because of genetic polymorphisms in liver enzymes that metabolize drugs. The recommended doses on the pill bottle represent what would be a "therapeutic dose" for the average person. Generally, drugs are not put on the market unless there is a wide margin between the therapeutic dose and the toxic dose to prevent people from accidentally overdosing, even if they take more than what is printed on the package. It is mostly people who consistently abuse medication who are most at risk for organ damage.
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