Ignorance About Health

Americans know much less about their own health than they think they do. They ought to have a reasonable layman's knowledge about what symptoms may mean, but ignorance in this area is discouraging, according to a Louis Harris poll commissioned by the Blue Cross Association. People think that they know as much as necessary, the survey of 1,609 showed, but many of them cannot answer specific questions.

The most striking example of overconfidence concerned cancer. Sixty-five percent thought that they could recognize the signs; the American Cancer Society, after all, has papered the nation with car cards, posters, leaflets and advertisements listing the "seven warning signals." Yet 30% could not name a single one of the seven, 17% could identify only one, 40% knew two or three signs, and only 13% could cite four or more. Concerning heart disease, 27% could not name a single obvious symptom like shortness of breath or chest pain.

Harris broke down his interview subjects by age, sex, race and educational background. Blacks, the elderly and people with limited schooling did worse than the rest of those questioned. On the cancer signs, 60% of the blacks could not name one, compared with 26% of the whites. Responding to the general questions, however, blacks seemed far better aware than whites of their need to know more. When asked about mental illness, 44% of the whites said they did not want to know more about it, and thus displayed a classic Freudian resistance: only 18% of the blacks shared that negative attitude.

Having information and acting on it, of course, can be two different things. The survey showed that 81% of those interviewed knew all about the benefits of regular exercise, but only 37% were personally doing anything about it. The Blue Cross sponsors of the study concluded sadly that knowledge in this case "is not very persuasive."

Harris also explored people's sources of medical information. Only a narrow majority (51%) mentioned physicians. Surprisingly, 52% cited TV, newspaper or magazine advertising as being among their sources. News stories in one medium or another were named by 79%. With a flourish of holier-than-thou rhetoric, the Blue Cross Association concluded: "It is really disgraceful that the American public must obtain a large part of its health knowledge from advertising and by ferreting out medical news from newspapers, magazines and television (much of which news has been so popularized and butchered as to be useless)."

Though health information sometimes is presented badly and tends to err on the side of overoptimism, no useful purpose is served by the Blue Cross scattergun blast. The fact is that the quality of health information provided by the lay media has improved over a quarter-century at least as much as health care has. At any rate, whether health information is accepted or retained depends less on the source than on whether the audience is motivated to be receptive.

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