Can The Public Being Illiterate In Medicine Increase Medical Disputes?

In recent years, the frequent occurrence of doctor-patient disputes seriously affects the process of building the harmonious society. The reasons of doctor-patient dispute are multiple, one of which is discussed by this paper is the relationship between the public medical literacy and doctor-patient disputes,taking the correlation between the lack of public medical literacy with the medical disputes as the main structure, and then expands the discussion.Firstly, it is discussed that science theories are relatively true, then the exploratory and uncertainty of medicine. After that, it leads to the concept and content of the medical literacy, making it clear of that of the medical disputes in this study.Secondly, based on the analysis to the media reports about all kinds of doctor-attacked events and the identified typical cases, we analyzed the correlation between public lack of medical literacy and medical disputes. On examining the doctor-attacked events, it shows that 80% events are caused by the patients’ misunderstanding of their therapeutic effects; meanwhile, it is also revealed in the events that more than half of the cases are caused by which the patients know too little about medical complication to accept the treatment results.At last, some countermeasures are put up to improve the public scientific literacy from four dimensions of nation, society, medical institutions and citizen oneself. One is that we should establish and improve reasonable medicine popularization policy, regulations and systems. Another is that a positive role must be guided to medicine in media propaganda; the third one is that the medical professional institutions and experts should actively participate in medicine popularization; finally, the public should be encouraged to know medicine as much as possible in their daily life.