Beyond the Exam Room: An Osteopathic Commitment to Patient Rights

June 2026 | Vol. 70, No. 2
By Sindy Paola Hernandez, PCOM OMS-III

For every medical student and future physician, there will come a day when an undocumented patient walks into their office. We are trained not only to treat illnesses but to advocate for our patients and the communities we serve. Advocacy does not end at ensuring medical equity—it extends into every aspect of our patients' lives.

In the words of Dr. Andrew Taylor Still, “The body is a unit; the person is a unit of body, mind, and spirit.”

Health is not just about medical treatment; it is shaped by environment, access to resources, and legal protections. Ensuring that individuals know their rights aligns with the osteopathic belief that a person’s well-being is interconnected with their circumstances.

Barriers to Achieving Health Literacy

February 2026 | Vol. 70, No. 1
By Angela Zawisza, DO, DMUCOM '07

“I don’t know how my parents would have managed this if I wasn’t a physician.”

This statement came from a colleague of mine, as we were discussing her father’s recent heart attack and my own father’s traumatic hemopneumothorax and subsequent hospitalizations. I echoed her sentiments, and my mind started down the rabbit hole of health care literacy in the United States.

The definition of health care literacy changed with the release of the US Government’s Healthy People 2030 initiative, compared to the Healthy People 2010 and 2020 definition. According to the newest initiative, health care literacy is defined as the following:

• “Personal health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.
• Organizational health literacy is the degree to which organizations equitably enable individuals to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.”

The changes in the definition, according to the CDC, “emphasize people's ability to use health information rather than just understand it, focus on the ability to make ‘well-informed’ decisions rather than ‘appropriate’ ones, acknowledge that organizations have a responsibility to address health literacy, and incorporate a public health perspective.”