It's the role of public health professionals to make the information available to as wide an audience as possible. The messaging is usually different for different groups. I can do pretty well, one-on-one with patient and family for a medical or surgical case. I can do fine explaining that same case to a friend/colleague "in the business". I have to modify the message for, say, a friend of the family (assumes I have permission to speak to them from the patient and/or family as appropriate) who might be an engineer... or a kindergarten teacher. Same thing with Public Health information. You really need to prepare the message for the audience you're addressing, and in a lot of ways, public health failed that test. We tried, too often, to simply state the facts and expect everyone to have our level of expertise in what we were describing. The words sounded a lot like English, but they didn't necessarily mean what you thought they meant because Those Words we were using might have a general and broad meaning in casual conversation and a more explicit and even nuanced meaning when we employed them in our work. Simply put, all too often, we talked in shorthand and others attempted to interpret what we said, but didn't really understand.
They're lucky to have you as a patient. I think my takeaway is to have a doctor whose patients are doctors
It's the role of public health professionals to make the information available to as wide an audience as possible. The messaging is usually different for different groups. I can do pretty well, one-on-one with patient and family for a medical or surgical case. I can do fine explaining that same case to a friend/colleague "in the business". I have to modify the message for, say, a friend of the family (assumes I have permission to speak to them from the patient and/or family as appropriate) who might be an engineer... or a kindergarten teacher. Same thing with Public Health information. You really need to prepare the message for the audience you're addressing, and in a lot of ways, public health failed that test. We tried, too often, to simply state the facts and expect everyone to have our level of expertise in what we were describing. The words sounded a lot like English, but they didn't necessarily mean what you thought they meant because Those Words we were using might have a general and broad meaning in casual conversation and a more explicit and even nuanced meaning when we employed them in our work. Simply put, all too often, we talked in shorthand and others attempted to interpret what we said, but didn't really understand.