Opponents respond that health professionals are not trained to evaluate literacy skills or to use the results to change their teaching methods. Most instruments for testing literacy skills school-based tests and may not be valid for adults in medical settings. They have much to fear if their secret is revealed. Testing is likely to cause anxiety, especially for poor readers and those for whom immigration status is a factor. The benefit of testing health literacy is far from clear.
Medical risk is low, but personal risk to patients is high.
This suggests that literacy testing should be done only for specific research purposes with fully informed participants, and that testing should measure the instruction's capacity to communicate the intended message, not the patient's capacity to decipher what we mean to say. Health Literacy and the Risk of Hospital Admission. Shame and health literacy, the unspoken connection. Newcomer JW, Selke G. et al.