Our Story
My father, Robert Rodvien M.D., and I created this non-profit business to share his knowledge about medicine and experiences in the healthcare system. Everything we do is dedicated to my mother Rayna. She was an amazing woman that, unfortunately, died of ovarian cancer in 2006. She felt very strongly that people need better information when it comes to dealing with the anxiety associated with serious illness. The entire process of being sick and getting care is difficult. The anxiety that patients and their family members experience plays such a crucial role in their quality of life - regardless of the outcome of the disease. We hope to share as much information as possible in order to help people cope.
The Issue
Acquiring knowledge and understanding about health, illness, and treatment has been shown to be a challenge to a large segment of our patient population. According to the American Medical Association, health literacy is "a stronger predictor of a person's health than age, income, employment status, education level, and race," yet the average person in the United States reads health-related material at only the fourth grade level. Exacerbating this situation is the fact that often the materials that are available to patients have promotional or advertising rather than informational goals. Websites and brochures are rife with marketing language to promote a hospital, center, or pharmaceutical product, leaving many information-seekers in the position of wary consumer instead of informed patient.
Conversations about medical issues between patients and their physician have not been seen to appreciably ameliorate this situation. Retention of information obtained in the course of an office visit has been seen to be troublingly low for large numbers of people. Related to this problem is the fact that physicians don’t often have the time to ensure that patients receive and retain critical medical information: physician time is limited and expensive, and, moreover, physicians aren’t equally skilled—some not so at all—in efficiently imparting medical information to their patients in ways that patients can best understand and retain. While there is a near universal focus in this country to deliver better health care while containing costs, we spend as much money in our health care delivery system(s) as the GNP of China, and in the process we largely neglect one of the most effective tools for ensuring optimum health care delivery at the lowest cost – patient education.
Patient education
Patient medical care is – and should be – left to physicians and surgeons. Yet palpable social, economic, and psychological unknowns remain within the patient and his or her family. Patients’ needs include getting the facts about their disease, and, beyond that, receiving information about the numerous non-clinical aspects of being a patient: dealing with relatives and friends (and their concerns and needs), managing insurance, understanding the side-effects of prescribed medicines, along with numerous other issues. Yet, we lack good methods of educating people involved in serious illnesses that answer their questions while allowing them to understand “patienthood” and helping to allay their fears. As Olson said in an article, significant differences exist between patients' and physicians' impressions about patient knowledge and inpatient care received. Steps to improve patient-physician communication should be identified and implemented.
Patienthood is that peculiar time when serious illness and anxiety combine to stymie health literacy and paralyze information retention just when people need them the most. Becoming a cancer patient is a good example. Becoming a cancer patient can be a sudden jolt – similar to Alice’s falling down the rabbit hole – into a totally bewildering new world of working with physicians to engage in treatment programs while maintaining jobs, life obligations, and relationships with friends and family. The ability to function judiciously is often diminished in such a bewildering state, and, like Alice, many begin to grope for solutions.
People with serious illness often experience heightened internal tensions on the way to medical appointments, treatments, and diagnostic tests. Anecdotal evidence suggests that although these patients may find educational material available for the taking at doctors’ offices, they leave much of this material unread or only skim it for tables, charts, or pictures. As indicated above, much of the information imparted during doctor visits is heard but not comprehended or remembered. Most patients would, no doubt, prefer learning from their physicians, but absent that source, they seek alternatives.
Outside a physician’s office, some patients, family members and friends are vulnerable to anecdotes. Others find hope-based messages more acceptable than evidence-based ones. Still others are willing to do anything that appears constructive even if there is no evidence of success. Some want to become experts in their field of illness and spend much time on-line to do so. No amount of education or anxiety appears to deter this need, and entering the world of medicine “on line” often creates misguided but nonetheless strongly held beliefs.
We need ways to help patients who want and need information about the issues surrounding illness.
