Experts from the Canadian Council of Learning drew their findings from an experiment that revealed that 60 percent of Canadians are without the proper reading and analytical skills needed for them to be better equipped with information regarding possible health concerns.
According to the researchers, simply reading on a daily level of books, newspapers, or websites, regardless of the topic, was seen to have the "single strongest effect" on people's capacity to process and understand important information linked to their health.
Council president and physician Paul Cappon explained that health literacy involved the ability to understand, evaluate, and make judgments on the health information given by doctors, with the patient being able to identify the validity among a plethora of possibly conflicting information from various sources.
"You need prose, literacy, you need document literacy, you need numeracy skills, and you need to use them simultaneously," Cappon said, as quoted by the Canwest News Service.
He furthered, "Literacy habits in daily life could substantially compensate for low levels of education when it comes to health literacy."
The link between health literacy and wellness was evident in the study, according to the Edmonton Sun, as analysis pointed to those with low health literacy as suffering from high diabetes levels. The literacy levels and the diabetes prevalence levels, according to the study, had an inverse relationship, with the latter going up as the former goes down.
"Once you have the illness, your knowledge of the disease, of what it does, of how to manage it, is going to be extremely important, critical, in fact, in terms of your ability to be able to control it," said Cappon.
The same trend showed for people with high blood pressure.
