This One Skill Will Make You Healthier

Most people don't struggle with healthcare because they're not trying hard enough. They struggle because nobody ever taught them this one skill.

This week, Scrub Talk launches the HEAL Series (Health Education and Literacy) — a new recurring segment built around one simple idea: you deserve to understand the system you're navigating, not just survive it.

Health literacy isn't about memorizing medical terminology or knowing the difference between an HMO and a PPO. In 2026, it's about filtering the noise, asking the right questions, and showing up to your care as an active participant. It is the single skill that changes every interaction you have with the healthcare system.

In this episode, we break down what health literacy actually looks like in practice: who's on your care team and how to think about the differences between them, how to know where to go when something goes wrong, and what it takes to leave a clinical visit with real clarity instead of confusion.

Topics covered: health literacy, primary care, urgent care vs. ER, the clinical hierarchy, patient advocacy, the exam room experience, and what it actually means to be an active partner in your own care. 

Heads Up: 

The conversations on Scrub Talk are meant to inform and inspire, not replace medical advice. The voices on this show — including mine — come with strong professional backgrounds and even stronger opinions. That doesn't mean anything you hear is medical guidance for your specific situation. Always talk to your doctor or a qualified healthcare provider about your own health. We're here to explore, not prescribe. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everyone, I'm Dominic Ramos and this is Scrub Talk. Welcome to the Shit Show. Guys, these last two weeks I have been operating on an average of three hours of sleep per night. And I'm gonna tell you why. I have been taking a Maymaster course. Now, for those of you who don't know what a Maymaster course is, I want you to think about your average college class, like chemistry. Most college courses last anywhere between four to five months. And the higher education system that we have has graciously given us the ability to take these courses in a much shorter format. So imagine taking a three-credit course in less than a month, precisely two weeks, and guess whose dumbass decided to take one of those many master courses? Me. I decided to take a course on human thought and behavior, which is essentially philosophy mixed with psychology, mixed with neuroscience. My brain is fried. I need some sleep. I know I should be sleeping right now, but honestly, the content train must keep going. Scrub talk must go on, which is why we are back for another episode. A few episodes ago, we talked about the importance of advocacy when it comes to you accessing the healthcare system. But honestly, I feel like I did you a bit of a disservice by dropping that in because the word advocacy is such a vague term. For many of us, it can look like a bunch of different things. It can mean standing up for yourself when you're feeling dismissed, or it can mean becoming a literal expert in your own condition. Regardless, advocacy does nothing for you if you don't have the actual tools to practice it in the first place. Without a blueprint, navigating this system just leads to frustration and more emotional, less than ideal outcomes, like videotaping your provider and trying to cancel them on social media. All jokes aside, the reason these clinical encounters tend to break down is usually because of a lapse in communication and baseline understanding. True advocacy isn't about fighting the system, it's driven by health literacy. Literacy is the actual engine that makes self-advocacy possible. So today we're gonna build a toolkit to help us better navigate the healthcare system. In this episode, I'm gonna introduce the vital role that health literacy plays in making you an active participant in your health. From there, we're gonna dive into the very first step of accessing care, meeting the members of your healthcare team, and strategically choosing the right provider. When I was in high school, one of the classes that I was required to take was a, I think it was a personal finance and economics course. Essentially, it was like a crash course on how to manage and save your money. And what's interesting to me is that I don't think I was ever offered a course on health literacy. Now, sure, many of the topics you would find in your average health literacy curriculum might be briefly touched on in your PE classes. Maybe they'll cover things like basic nutrition and hygiene. But there's certainly no course out there that teaches you what to do or who to see when you're actually sick. There's definitely nothing in the primary education curriculum that teaches you how to pick the right health insurance plan. And for most of us, all of this is typically figured out through painful trial and error. And I think it's important for us to really build a foundation for health literacy because in future episodes, I really want to bring in experts from all over the healthcare space to talk about things that they're passionate about and share their stories. But I don't think it's going to be helpful for you if you don't understand what is being discussed and how you can best synthesize that information. So, in an effort to close this gap, we're gonna launch a brand new series on Scrub Talk that I call Heal, which stands for health, education, and literacy. And throughout these episodes, we're gonna provide you with the tools to better understand your body and give you some actionable insights to navigate the matrix of it all. So, what is health literacy? In today's world, it isn't necessarily about memorizing biology or medical terminology. That's what your healthcare team is for. That's what the experts are for. I want you to think about health literacy as medical fitness. And it comes down to two things: how you filter information and how you act on it. We are flooded with health data the second you open your phone. High health literacy acts as a mental filter. It allows you to accurately curate the truth from the hype and process what that data actually means in order for you to make an informed executive decision instead of a choice driven by panic or social media trends. When I was doing research on barriers to healthcare access, I had the opportunity to sit down with individuals from all walks of life, from healthcare workers and talk show hosts to teachers and students. And one of the major themes that constantly emerged from those discussions was this reality that navigating the system can oftentimes feel like going to a foreign country. It feels like we need to have a translator in the room. And I don't think that's necessarily because medical professionals are trying to speak with heavy jargon. I think it's just a byproduct of how the system operates. One of my biggest frustrations as someone who works in this industry is this idea that we need to dumb things down. I mean, if you look at the CDC's guidelines, it talks about using plain language. And I'm all for meeting people where they're at. But honestly, that's an insult to you as a consumer. And that's also an insult to me as well. It does everyone a massive disservice when you're trying to comprehend things about your own body and your own health. Nobody knows your body better than you do. And having the language to describe what's happening is crucial. I'm not going to bore you with dry medical terminology today, as exciting as that does sound, because I really think talking about medicine is awesome. But it is absolutely worth applying your understanding to the people that you're going to be practicing these skills with. Let's look at your healthcare team. If you've ever walked into a clinic or hospital recently, you've probably noticed that almost everyone is wearing scrubs. Like, welcome to Scrub Talk, right? Sorry, I have not had any sleep. So please forgive me for the jokes. This is the post-COVID reality of healthcare. Everyone from the front desk to your administrators to your clinical staff is wearing scrubs. So how do you differentiate who is who? Well, you've probably seen people wearing white coats, but honestly, it feels like everyone is wearing a white coat nowadays, right? And so how else do we differentiate them? Well, you've probably seen people wearing badges with letters like M D, D O, N P, P A, R N, M A. And this alphabet suit can be quite dizzying. So today I want to focus specifically on your medical providers, the individuals who can independently diagnose, manage, and bill for medical services. The first lesson that I want you to understand about the word provider is that that is an insurance-driven term. So as much as I hate using that term to describe providers, because anyone who does direct patient care, like myself, is a provider. For the purposes of this episode, it's important to distinguish that people like physicians and nurse practitioners and physician assistants, they're the ones who are considered providers. Now, does it matter which type of provider you see? I wish it was a clear answer. So I'm going to say yes and no. You're going to hear a lot of different answers from everyone, especially if you pull members of each profession. Each has their own unique strengths and skill sets, but they are all vital members playing on the exact same team. As a future doctor, I might be slightly biased because that's the world I know. But I do want to distinguish how these roles function from a systems viewpoint. And to do that, we're going to have to look at this through a hierarchy. And before any of my professional colleagues come at me in the comments, please understand that I am communicating this from a sociopsychological and operational perspective. And as someone who has pulled straight A's in abnormal psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, sociology, race and ethnic sociology, as well as cognitive and social neuroscience, I promise you, I am the most qualified to break down the group dynamics here. That's a joke. Humans naturally organize complex systems into hierarchies. So at the apex of the clinical hierarchy, you're gonna find physicians, MDs, and DOs. These individuals possess the longest and most comprehensive depth of diagnostic training. And then a rung below them, you have your nurse practitioners, otherwise known as NPs, and physician assistants, PAs. These individuals are often referred to advanced practice providers or mid-levels. Regardless, all three of these professionals collaborate within this ecosystem. Now, please don't misinterpret what I'm saying. This isn't an insinuation that your physicians, like your MDs and DOs, are inherently better people or providers than APPs. Everyone has a unique clinical experience. I've heard countless stories from friends who prefer a PA or an NP, stating that they've received far better, more attentive care from them than from most MDs. And I wouldn't disagree with that. In fact, in my episode about advocacy, I talk about how my very first primary care provider was a nurse practitioner. And I absolutely loved her. She was excellent. But eventually, what I needed from my healthcare team shifted the type of provider that I needed. I required someone who could take a very complex case like mine and take on a bulk of specialized prescribing needs that fell outside of her comfort zone. And so I had to switch to an MD at the time. That switch wasn't a moral failure on her part. In fact, I applaud that nurse practitioner because she didn't try to force a fit-in area outside of her scope. She escalated my care to someone equipped for that exact complexity. And that is exactly the distinct feature that a physician provides. I want you to think about providers like iPhone models. Every year, Apple releases a new iPhone. They have a base model, they have a Pro model, and maybe sometimes they'll have what, an Air or a C model. It's honestly a little confusing for me. But every single one of these models is objectively a great phone. They operate in the same ecosystem and perform the same core functions. However, as you move up the tiers, the underlying specs change noticeably, right? The graphics chip changes, the processing power deepens, and the camera capabilities open up for highly technical tasks. Personally, I'm more of an iPhone Pro Max type of guy myself. I like having the heavy-duty processing power and the advanced features at my disposal. I also like having a bigger phone. Bigger in this case is definitely better. Pause. Clean it up, Dominic. In the exact same way, I have a preference for having an MD as my anchored provider. Now, please don't read too deep into this analogy because it kind of went in a very weird direction, and I'm sorry. Um, what was I saying? Please don't read too deep into this analogy, okay? If any of you has like a nurse practitioner friend or a PA friend, I know some of my nurse practitioner friends are listening. I'm not calling you the C version of an iPhone, all right? That's not the intention. It's just the best way I know how to distinguish each of these providers, all right? APPs like your nurse practitioners and physician assistants can absolutely earn an advanced clinical doctorate, like a doctor of nursing practice or a doctor of medical science, which represents an incredible dedication to education. But from a structural and foundational training standpoint, understanding the different specs and boundaries of your care team is a vital part of protecting your health. And so you might be thinking, well, okay, what about your respiratory therapists and nurses and MAs and techs and and other allied health professionals? I guess you could consider them, I don't know. Maybe they're Apple Watches or AirPods. Okay, let me stop. Uh I'm completely beating this analogy. Um now that you know the faces of your care team, the next logical question becomes where do I go when something goes wrong? Medical professionals can specialize in hundreds of areas. But for the purposes of this episode, I want us to look at three distinct areas of the primary care setting that you're going to interact with for your general health and wellness. Those are primary care, urgent care, and emergency care. Now, I want you to think of your primary care provider or your PCP as your anchor. They're the people who manage everything health related. Next, we have emergency care, which is committed entirely to its namesake, true medical emergencies. But defining an emergency is incredibly difficult because a crisis to you might look completely different to an ER doctor. So, for some context here, the other day I was using one of those foam rollers after a really brutal workout. And man, I can still feel it. When I tell you that I was in some really excruciating pain, I really did consider going to the emergency room. But that intense muscle pain that I was experiencing is obviously not something that an ER provider would consider an emergency, unless there were other salient details that made it an emergency. The reality of our system is that emergency rooms or emergency departments operate on some very strict guidelines. Going to the ER for moderate stomach pain is going to look completely different than going for a major traumatic event. If you want a great visual of this, there was a fantastic video by Michelle Correy where she took on the challenge of working as a triage officer in a simulated emergency room alongside Dr. Mike. And this perfectly demonstrates the high-stakes, complex decision making that dictates who gets seen first. So, what about urgent care? It seems like a pretty decent middle ground if your PCP is closed, but you don't need to be in a trauma bay. You're gonna find it's a great setting for acute short-term issues like a rash or minor cuts or flu-like symptoms. However, I know that there are some of you who've been in this scenario. You go to an urgent care center only for them to tell you we can't treat this here. You need to go to the ER. It's incredibly frustrating because not only have I been forced to wait in one setting and I now have to go and wait in another, but I'm also stuck with potentially two separate bills. And if you're someone like me who gets anxious and really wants full certainty before making a decision, how do you make the right call? Well, context is everything, and I think that's worth noting here because if you are a generally healthy individual with no chronic conditions, I want to give you an easy framework to use when a new symptom pops up. It's called TLIC, T-L-I-C-C. And this is actually a pretty good framework because it's modeled essentially after how your clinical team map out a patient's history of present illness. So T stands for time. How long has this been going on? Is it sudden or has it been worsening over the past few weeks? Keep in mind, if you go to the ER for a long-standing non-emergent issue, you are going to wait for hours because of triage. Whereas urgent care is typically much faster for a standard issue. Next letter, L, location. Where exactly is the issue? Is it localized to a finger? Or is it something more broad or systemic, involving your entire chest or your entire abdomen? I intensity. On a scale of one to ten, how severe is it? A dull ache points to urgent, whereas sudden blinding, unmanageable pain kind of points to the ER. C change. Is the symptoms staying the same, or is it rapidly evolving and getting worse by the minute? C. Context. What else is going on? What do you do for a living? Do you have any complex or chronic medical conditions? Context is important when trying to establish who and how you get seen. Now, it is worth mentioning that this framework may not be applicable to everyone. When I worked in oncology, context was everything. A mild fever for a healthy person usually means a trip to urgent care, or at least, in my experience, sucking it up. But a mild fever to an oncology patient undergoing active treatment like chemotherapy may be a profound and life-threatening emergency that requires immediate stabilization. But when in doubt, use your resources. Many insurance plans and hospital systems offer 24-7 telehealth consults or a nurse triage line. Call them or your doctor's office first for guidance. But what if you aren't feeling sick at all? What if you just want an understanding of where your health is at? Maybe you've seen some of the commercials about Wigovi or Zetbound and feel like you could lose a few pounds? Or what if you're starting to feel down and maybe think you could benefit from something like peptides or testosterone replacement? This is where I have. Stress the importance of having a primary care provider. I want you to think of your PCP as the quarterback of your medical team. I know that there is a real struggle out there. Right now, booking an appointment with a PCP can take anywhere from six to eight months, sometimes even a year. And that's incredibly discouraging, especially if your occupational or health outlook feels really unpredictable. But what I really want to stress here is that you should never lose sight of the long-term goal because having an established PCP on your team yields a massive dividend. So going back to my experience with my primary care team, when I transitioned my care to an MD, she was able to pretty much seamlessly manage and prescribe my Vive Ants for ADHD. And even though I later transitioned to a psychiatrist for long-term management, I can still rely on her to bridge and even refill my medication if I ever run into an insurance or scheduling issue with my specialist. Why? Because she knows my history. She understands what is baseline for me, and she's able to see the whole picture. Specialists are incredible. They undergo years of rigorous training to become absolute masters of a specific organ system or disease process. But they only look at you through a specific lens. Having a primary care provider ensures that every area of your health is managed dynamically from your routine screenings to age-appropriate vaccinations. So after listening to all that, you're probably wondering, okay, well, what do I do with all that information that you just gave me, Dominic? So picture this scenario for me. You're finally seeing a provider, you fill out exhaustive paperwork, pay your copay, go over your symptoms with the medical assistant or nurse doing your intake, someone like me, and then you sit on that exam table with a really fashionable paper robe, waiting for what feels like 20 to 30 minutes, and your provider finally walks in, gives a quick hello, listens to your brief explanation, and suddenly they're off to the races. The visit feels incredibly rushed. You leave feeling like you didn't really make a connection. And underneath it all, you're left wondering, did they even fully grasp what is going on with me? How can I be sure that this is the right plan? And I gotta tell you, I work in a high-volume dermatology practice, and I see this operational reality every single day. My provider alone sees anywhere from 40 to 50 patients a day. We room patients fast and the provider diagnoses pretty fast. And typically our patients are checked out within 15 to 20 minutes of them arriving. And to a patient, that can feel incredibly jarring and raise doubts about whether they received comprehensive care. But here's an insider secret that I want to let you in on. However, behind the scenes efficiency doesn't excuse the fact that you might leave the office feeling confused and left out of the loop. The after-visit summaries that they hand you at checkout are pretty generic and they're honestly not that helpful. So, what concrete tools do you have at your disposal to fix this? One tool that we can use is the teachback method. So in medicine, providers are taught to use teachback as a way to verify that you, the patient, understands instructions. One of the most common things we'll say is, okay, what is your understanding of your condition today? When are you going to return to the office? And this stuff is pretty useful for us. But I honestly think that as a patient, you can actively leverage this in your own way. Instead of waiting for your provider to ask you the questions, what might help you is proactively summarizing the plan back to them before they leave the room. So, for example, this might look like, okay, just to make sure that we are on the same page, I'm gonna take this medication twice a day for two weeks. If this rash doesn't clear up by Friday, I'm gonna give you a call, right? So by using active recall on them, it can provide some assurance for your provider that you are leaving the appointment with clarity. Another useful tactic that you might benefit from is by bringing your own physical notebook, start building your own personal chart. And this may seem counterintuitive because there's a lot of patient portals that do a good job of keeping your medical history organized. I do think everyone could benefit from having a physical copy of their own chart. When I worked in head and neck oncology, I had a patient who had survived a pretty complex mandibular cancer. And she had done multiple complex operations, including adjuvant chemotherapy and radiotherapy, for about maybe six years. And every single time she came in for a follow-up, she would bring in this really thick three-ring binder to almost every single appointment. And it had tabs for not only her office notes, but also her personal symptom diaries. And even surprisingly, she had plastic sleeves, which held her imaging discs. Now, you don't have to go full oncology binder mode if you're a person who's of general good health, but tracking your records, maybe digitally or in an analog format, is a game changer. For me, I bring a notebook to almost every appointment that I go to. I mostly use this notebook as a planner, but I also use it to jot down some quick notes, especially if my provider is going fast. Sometimes my provider might write down, okay, follow up in three months. Oh, you should also try taking vitamin D. My primary care provider has a knack for doing that, by the way. Sometimes she'll just randomly throw out something at the very end, and I'm just kind of like, whoa, wait a second. But it's really important to do that because I now have a place where I wrote it down. And even if I don't understand why that was written down, what I can at least do is either stop my provider before we leave and say, hey, you said something about vitamin D, or even the next day when I'm reading through the notes and feeling confused. There are times where I may call the office or leave a message or even send a message through the portal so that I can get some clarity on what we discussed. My third recommendation from you if you're someone who struggles with memory or maybe some anxiety, you have some white coat syndrome, I think you should bring a second set of eyes and ears. Having a trusted friend or family member in the room to take notes can be really helpful because that person can provide some really objective context. And that's really essential. I mean, I I have plenty of elderly patients who who will bring their children or their partners with them, but but this can be extremely useful for anyone of any age, right? Having a partner or a friend serve as a point of recall can kind of change the entire dynamic. The last tool I think you should consider, and this comes with a caveat, by the way, is to ask if you can voice record your visit. Right now, AI transcription tools are becoming a standard for providers. And if they're going to leverage that, honestly, if the policies allow for it and the provider is okay with it, then you should be able to leverage your smartphone in a similar fashion. But I do want to be explicit here. Do not, and I mean do not record your team without their permission. Okay. Look, I love a good gotcha moment as much as the next person out there, but recording secretly completely shatters the trust between you and your provider. I've had patients secretly record with me while I was providing education. And when I notice a phone secretly rolling, it's incredibly violating. Because now I'm not just thinking about myself, I'm also thinking about what else have you recorded? Did you record conversations that other patients had at the nurse's station? Or if you're doing a video recording, how much protected health information did you record from another person's monitor? That stuff is really important to consider here. So if you want your provider to respect you, I think you also need to respect their baseline privacy and rights as well. Simply asking, hey, I want to make sure I don't forget these instructions. Do you mind if I record this appointment? I honestly think most people will gladly say yes. Okay. Well, that seems like a pretty good place for us to stop. Look, I know this information is dense. However, your ability to synthesize it and navigate the system will naturally improve with time. Should your provider be meeting you halfway? Absolutely. But I promise you, you're gonna feel infinitely more empowered as a consumer if you show up to the table as an active, curious partner. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The days of patriarchal medicine, where your doctor would travel to your house and hand you a mysterious elixir and you just blindly trust them, are completely gone. Nowadays, our world is consumed with social media and even AI. And as providers, we are actively adjusting to a reality where our patients arrive highly equipped and knowledgeable. In that same regard, I think it's really essential for anyone who is a patient, which is pretty much everybody. So embrace that reality and turn your care into a mutual partnership. So what I'm hoping from this heal framework is that we eventually build it into a guide that you can keep with you somewhere, maybe as a printout or somewhere on your phone. I think that's actually going to be one of the most useful tools that we have. So if you have any thoughts or ideas about how we can improve the heel framework, please go ahead, leave a rating, and add to the comments. It really does help. If you like what you heard, please like, subscribe, follow wherever you get your podcasts. Also, if you could do me another kind favor, if you happen to like what you're listening to and you feel like someone else might benefit from the content that we make on Scrub Talk, please share it with them. It really does help more than you know. Anyways, I'm Dominic Ramos, and this is Scrub Talk. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Scrub Talk. Scrub Talk is produced by me, Dominic Ramos. If you like what you heard, please take a moment to leave a rating and review and subscribe so you never miss an episode. A quick note before you go Scrub Talk is intended for informational and educational purposes only. Nothing you hear on this show should be taken as medical advice. And nothing here establishes a patient-provider relationship. For anything medical, please consult with a qualified clinician who knows your situation. See you on the next one.