Teaching Health to People the System Forgot to Teach

By Ladann Kiassat

Think about how you learned to take care of your body. Someone taught you why you wash your hands before you eat, what to do when your stomach hurts, and what a fever means. Maybe it was a parent, a health class, a pamphlet in a waiting room, Google at midnight. However the information was presented, you learned it. You built a working understanding of your body, and you carry it into every doctor’s visit, every prescription you decide whether to finish, and every judgment about when an illness is worth worrying about.

Now imagine that no one ever taught you. Imagine that the health class moved too fast, the pamphlet was written five reading levels above you, and the doctor spoke to the person who drove you instead of speaking to you. Imagine being handed responsibility for a lifelong condition without ever being given the information required to manage it. This is the reality for many adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Adults with developmental and cognitive differences experience higher rates of preventable chronic conditions and lower rates of preventive screening than the general population. These outcomes are frequently attributed to disability itself, as though poor health were an unavoidable feature of a diagnosis. It is not. It is what happens when health education is written exclusively for people who read quickly, sit still through long explanations, and are assumed to be capable of understanding. Everyone else is quietly filtered out. The inequity is not in the person. It is in the design.

I was raised to believe that the value of a life is measured by intention and by the quality of a person’s daily experience, not by its length or by conventional markers of success. That belief is what made this gap impossible for me to walk past. The more time I spent with this community, the harder it became to accept that the materials meant to help people were the same materials excluding them. I wanted to build the version that did not exclude them.

My Albert Schweitzer Fellowship project, the Healthy Living Toolkit, is a community-based health education curriculum built in partnership with The Arc of Macomb County for adult learners with developmental and cognitive differences. The curriculum is organized into three areas: nutrition and energy, hygiene and infection prevention, and health and wellness habits. Each lesson is written in plain language, structured around a single concept, and designed to be taught, repeated, and returned to. The lessons speak to adults as adults. They assume competence and supply the information that competence requires. The goal is not to simplify health for the sake of simplifying it. The goal is access, and access is what turns a diagnosis into something a person can actually manage.

Health education is not a supplementary service. It is the foundation that makes every other form of care usable. When we exclude people from that foundation, we do not just leave them uninformed. We leave them dependent, and then we treat the dependence as though it were inevitable.

So here is what I would ask. If you fund, legislate, teach, or design health programs, look closely at the materials you hand people. Ask whether the person in front of you can actually use them. If the answer is no, that is not a limitation of the patient. It is a limitation of what we built, and anything we built, we can build better.

Even when a condition cannot be cured, care is always meaningful. Accessible education is what makes that care reachable.

Humanitarian Day is celebrated on August 19. Ladann Kiasatt is a student at the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine and an Albert Schweitzer Fellow at Authority Health.