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- 50 percent of adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level.
- 20 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level.
- Nearly half of all Americans read so poorly that they cannot find a single piece of information when reading a short publication.
National
Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy - 2010
Survey: More Than Half Can't Find Heart on Body Diagram
The Silent Epidemic - The Health Effects of Illiteracy
". . . in an era of 'pay for performance,'
physicians might avoid low-literacy patients, viewing them
as time- consuming and difficult to treat. Many literacy
experts say that physicians often perceive inquiring about
reading ability as opening Pandora's box, releasing a sprawling,
unwieldy problem that they haven't been trained to handle
and that is beyond the scope of a 15-minute office visit.
'Physicians are not prepared to know what [their] immediate
repsonse should be,' said Dean Schillinger, an internist
at San Francisco General Hospital who has conducted several
studies of physicians and health literacy. He added that
the health care system does not help physicians who treat
low-literacy patients."
