Health Literacy and Empowerment
Health literacy may be considered the most important predictor and component of the social determinants of health. The World Health Organization stated that health literacy is “a stronger predictor of an individual’s health status than income, employment status, education, and racial or ethnic group” [Health literacy is generally considered a set of knowledge, skills, or a hierarchy of functions; most of the studies in this field to date have focused on basic health literacy and numeracy skills, as components of so-called functional literacy. Indeed, the tests most commonly used to measure health literacy, the Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults [Patient knowledge is nowadays often considered a part of the wider concept of health literacy. The situational conditions of the controversy over DTCA for prescription drugs lead, as we have seen, to claims that lifting the ban would result in people becoming better informed about medical subjects. It can certainly be assumed that medical decisions are based on knowledge, almost exclusively the health care provider’s knowledge until recently and increasingly the patients’ knowledge as patients become more active in participating in medical decision-making [Our research interest is to find out whether a lift of the ban on DTCA for prescription drugs increases health literacy (to which knowledge belongs). A systematic review provided substantial evidence for DTCA prompting information-seeking in patients [Throughout its existence as a scholarly construct, health literacy had a sister concept in (patient) empowerment [If empowerment used to be understood as something that was very much like health literacy, something that need not be differentiated, and something the relationship of which did not need any intellectual effort, the relationship between health literacy and empowerment could well be left alone. However, the view seems to be gaining ground that the two constructs will not necessarily be in a harmonious situation. This is especially so when individuals show high empowerment coupled with low health literacy [