Health information isn’t set up to be communicated with the public, which decreases access to personal and public health literacy. Health and medical communication is difficult in the first place, with the sociopolitical undertones riddled swiss cheese gaps in communication. When complex concepts with long, nuanced histories are communicated with an audience who doesn’t have any prior knowledge on the subject (other than preconceived notions shaped by society and media) without making it accessible or relevant to them, the result is often confusion or defensiveness. The door to potential learning and understanding gets effectively slammed shut, and your audience tends to shut down with it. Where someone once might have been open to learning about the information being communicated, they might now feel talked down, causing them to form negative associations that inspire them to disregard any further or future clarifications on the matter.

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My relationship with health and medicine is constantly evolving and always subject to where I’m standing- whether as a patient, consumer, caregiver, or advocate. I learned early on that even accessing the bare necessities of medical care requires significant emotional labor. Patients are often expected to become researchers, presenting a PowerPoint on potential diagnoses, requested tests, treatment options, and an annotated bibliography of symptoms just to persuade a provider that their condition is real, valid, and worthy of care. Healthcare might have once been a hopeful little compound word, but those two terms have long since divorced. Health has become a business, and care no longer seems intrinsic to the model.​