The impact of health literacy on oral health

Since a few years ago, the deep need to know how the diseases could be affecting people health and how individuals could take advantage of this knowledge, it has become in an important piece of a big puzzle, because at the extent people know best what is happening with their health, then they can prevent and even protect themselves against potential harmful factors more effectively.

In this sense, health promotion has dedicated a special emphasis to the development of health literacy of individuals, as the ability to know and put into practice skills regarding how is their health functioning, how to self-care it, and how they can access to the health care system in an effective and opportune way. People who know best what are their health condition increase their probability to be healthy at the end, because, develop a better capability to self-care it avoiding potential risk factors and undesirable outcomes.

This revolutionary method of learning has influenced the individual’s behavior in a positive way, improving health provider-patient’s communication ensuring the health goals accomplishing in the end. Because individuals can better find information about their health, making their own decisions, processing the information and following medical recommendations easily without losing any detail, in the same way, they are capable to know what are the best choices for them, having the opportunity to make sound decisions with better outcomes.

Using health literacy as a tool to improve individual’s oral health could be an essential step to take in the health education and health promotion because, at the extent individual understands what are factors which are affecting their oral health these could be avoided, in fact, we would have people more satisfied regarding their oral health transmitting the same experience to others, multiplying healthy advice to everyone.

As a matter of fact, most the times people go out the health provider office without basic knowledge about their health condition, or if so, it is not understandable enough, for that reason, individuals are not motivated sufficiently to self-care any aspect of their health because they do not know what is really wrong with their oral health.

In order to prevent, improve, and produce a positive impact on their people health it is absolutely necessary to develop and put into practice the health literacy skills as an economical and sustainable alternative in short.

References

1. Guo Y, Logan HL, Dodd VJ, Muller KE, et al. Health Literacy: A Pathway to Better Oral Health American Journal of Public Health (ajph). 2014. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2014.301930. Accessed July 24, 2018.

2. Center for Disease and Health Prevention CDC. Health Literacy. https://www.cdc.gov/healthliteracy/learn/index.html. Published December 13, 2016. Accessed July 24, 2018.

3. Speros C. Health Literacy Concept Analysis. . 2005;50(6):633-40. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15926968.

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