Cross Cultural Differences in Health Literacy and Consumers’ Empowered Engagement in the Management of Health

Abstract

Perhaps no other area of human consumption offers more promise for transformative consumer welfare and, at the same time, presents more challenges for achieving it than consumers’ engagement in medical decisions that directly affect their health (Herzlinger 2006; Berenson 2005; Enthoven 2004). Consumers, even those who are literate by conventional standards of education and communication, are often functionally illiterate as they generally lack sufficient specialized knowledge to autonomously select medical professionals or evaluate medical advice (McCray 2005).