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Doctors Test Effort that Helps People Understand Health Risk Information |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: In a study published in the Feb. 20 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers with Dartmouth Medical School and the Veterans Affairs Outcomes Group at the White River Junction (Vt.) VA Medical Center have tested whether a primer, which the researchers also wrote, helped people better understand information about health risks and interventions meant to reduce those risks. "We wrote the primer because, while people are bombarded with messages about health risks and treatment benefits, little is done to prepare them to understand these messages," says Steven Woloshin, one of the authors on the paper and an associate professor of community and family medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. Woloshin and his co-authors Lisa Schwartz and H. Gilbert Welch, all of whom are affiliated with Dartmouth's Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences and the Veterans Affairs Outcomes Group at the White River Junction (Vermont) VA Medical Center, tested more than 500 people with varying levels of education. The authors tested two parallel, randomized groups of people, one involving about 200 patients with low socioeconomic status (50 percent had a high school degree or less formal education) and the other with about 300 patients with high socioeconomic status (80 percent had at least a college degree). The researchers point out that, while good data interpretation skills are needed to make good decisions, they did not directly test the effect of the primer on actual decision making.
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