I came across a rather innocuous article recently posted in the University of Michigan Health Blogs concerning medicalese, the language used by physicians, and the need for patients in learn it (see: Mastering Medicalese). Below is an excerpt from it:
Unless we happened to choose a career in the medical field, most of us gave up learning medical terminology in high school health or college biology. Then we get cancer and come face to face with big, incomprehensible words that we’ve done just fine not knowing our whole lives. It’s like going to a foreign land without speaking the language and being unable ask for directions. Since healing is our destination when we detour to Cancer Land, it helps to understand how to get there. And that means learning at least some Medicalese. I know it’s not easy. Like most people, I was thoroughly dazed and confused when I was first diagnosed. Not only was I facing a life-threatening disease, but suddenly I was hearing and reading huge words that I didn’t understand. No wonder I felt unequipped to make informed decisions that needed to be made....I was frustrated that I had to spend hours poring through medical dictionaries just to understand what was happening to my body and where, and I complained to my husband that Medicalese might as well be Greek....The National Institutes of Health has an excellent online medical dictionary with easy-to-understand definitions of most medical terms. Additionally, our doctors know that we’re not fluent in their language. I’ve found that some are better than others at translating Medicalese into lay language, but most will do their best if we ask.
Although the author of the article was well meaning, I found that I disagreed with her basic premise. I think that she is saying the following: many physicians will try their best to use a vocabulary that patients understand but patients would be well advised to learn medicalese. As part of the patient-centered approach to healthcare, this equation needs to be turned around. Physicians should be trained (and yes, obligated) to use a vocabulary that the majority of patients will understand. If the patient has a knowledge of some medical terms, so much the better, but this should not be an obligation on his or her part.
All individuals with some form of specialized training from auto mechanics to financial planners have their own "job" vocabularies but they understand that they need to communicate with their customers or they will lose business. We tend to shy away from labeling patients as "customers" but we might be farther ahead if we did so in terms of the expected behavior of the physicians caring for them.
My first reaction to the article quoted above was to question the value of the NIH online medical dictionary but then thought better of it. Such a dictionary could be essential in enabling patients to use the web to seek information about their diseases which I think is both necessary and appropriate. I have referred to this phenomenon in past notes as consulting Dr. Google (see: Paging Dr. Google! We Are Waiting for a Second Opinion; Teaching Consumers to Say "No" to Physicians' Recommendations; Unreported Drug Side Effects Discovered by Analysis of Google Big Data).
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