Lost in translation: Are we reaching the target audience with internet-based education materials?

摘要

Helping patients to understand the risks and benefits of treatment choices is central to patient-centered care, achieving optimal quality of care, and empowering patients to choose treatments that are consistent with their goals and values. Yet, medical conditions and treatments often have complex names, and inadequate explanations are provided to help translate such terms for our patients. How can patients make the best choice for treatments if we do not communicate clearly about therapeutic options? This issue of the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology contains an important study of how we educate patients about uterine fibroid treatment. Shukla et al (1) evaluated the readability of Internet-based patient education materials about uterine artery embolization for treatment of fibroid tumors.