Deliberate Confusion

Have you ever attended a lecture and when it was over you thought, I didn’t understand any of what the speaker was talking about. Maybe if he or she had used normal words I would have understood the point they were trying to make. That person must really know their stuff. What makes things worse is when you look at all the other attendees. They are applauding and commenting on how intelligent the speaker is. Now you may be thinking, boy, am I dumb? I wish the person had spoken a little plainer, so I knew what they were talking about. Was all that technical jargon necessary or was it meant to impress the audience with how smart they are?

You don’t need to attend a lecture to experience this under-educated feeling, simply visit your doctor. As part of their curriculum, medical schools must train their students on how to present themselves as being the smartest person in the room, or they will be a disgrace to the profession. To reinforce this aura of superiority they must learn to speak portions of dead languages to describe simple ailments. Many words in the English language are derived from Latin and ancient Greek, but no one uses the original version, except doctors. Even the Catholic Church gave up using Latin in a large segment of its service. Why should people attend a service where they don’t know what’s being said, when they can cross the street and understand everything?

Okay, let’s look at some of the more uncommon words that are used by the family physician to describe normal ailments. You have had an accident and want your doctor to check out the injury. Assuming you are fortunate enough to see the doctor and not one of the Mini-Me’s, you will be examined and may be told, “You have a Contusion or Ecchymosis on your right Femur or Femoral Region.” Naturally your first response might be, “how serious is this, Doc? Do I need to go to the hospital?” What you’ve actually been told is, you have a bruise on your right thigh. The translation sounds far less ominous, but not nearly as professional.

Let’s try another phrase doctors use quite often, Hypertension. We’ve all heard the word hyper before. The definition is unusually energetic. Tension is another common word meaning stretched tight or mental or emotional strain. When a doctor combines the two words he’s talking about high blood pressure. Wouldn’t be less stressful on the patient to be told he or she had a condition that they didn’t have to ask, “what’s that mean?” I’m not saying that high blood pressure isn’t serious, but why amplify the patients concern by using a term they don’t understand.

Let’s try a simple comparison. You bring your car to a mechanic because it’s running rough. He checks it out and reports that your ride has developed an acute embolism. Your brain goes into overdrive, and you start to wonder how much a new car is going to cost you. Your next question is what’s that and what will it cost to fix it? The mechanic responds that your car has a clogged fuel line, and it will cost $200.00 to replace it. The stress level is drastically reduced, and you get the car fixed. If he had said that to begin with, there wouldn’t be any stress.

Here is a word you hope to never hear from your doctor, Idiopathic. What he’s telling you is you have a condition that he hasn’t got a clue what it is. You’ve gone through all the blood testing, been run through all the alphabet soup machines, MRI, CAT scan, X-rays, eco-cardiogram, and everything says you’re normal. Now you’re back to where you started, minus a chunk of cash. If only the medical profession would tell it like it is.