What Are the Drawbacks of Medical Terminology?
If you have ever been lost when talking to your doctor, likely you have a lot of company. Medical terminology, while essential to doctors, can leave you feeling like they're speaking in a foreign language. Although medical terminology helps medical personnel give precise descriptions of illnesses, injuries, or conditions, it presents several problems for the general public.
Too Many Confusingly Similar Terms
Even medical school students find it difficult to learn all the medical terms used. If this is the case, then the average patient is unlikely to have much luck. Not only are there a lot of terms to know, but some of these terms can be quite similar yet mean vastly different things. Hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia, for example, are close enough to cause confusion, yet they are opposites of each other. The former means having too much sugar in the blood stream while the later means having too little.
Alienation of Patients
When doctors use medical terminology, then have to explain each one, the patient is likely to feel "talked down to." Although most people can't possibly understand all the medical terminology, it is easy for patients to feel dumb and alienated by the necessity of having words frequently explained to them. According to Halvor Nordby in the medical journal "Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics," most patients instead infer the meanings of medical terminology from sentence context, which is not necessarily the same thing as the actual definition.
Depersonalization of Medical Care
Patients who feel alienated by their health care providers are likely to either seek care less often or defer decision making to their physicians. Nordby states that patients often "defer to doctors" because patients know they do not completely understand. Thus patients voluntarily bow out of decisions in their own medical care and assume they have nothing valuable to add to the process.
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