Take My Words

A friend of mine recently told me that we doctors are keen on using abbreviations. Very true. Two types of languages exist in this planet: language used by mankind and the language medical doctors speak.

Doctors speak different language, a fact we must admit before any meaningful dialogue can be carried on. I was reminded of the occasions when my patient developed a stroke without obvious cause. "Mr. X, I’m sorry to tell you that your dad suffers from a cryptogenic stroke." Or, as most of doctors have done before, "Ms Y, this might sound a frightening disease with sudden violent body shaking and foaming at the mouth. Blah, blah, blah. The condition is known as idiopathic epilepsy." Your doctor said it in the it’s-a-big-diagnosis-and-leave-me-no-question tone. You want to believe in him. You have to. You have to trust the doctor within the ten-minute appointment that had taken you ten months – if not more - to schedule.

What an excellent language! Can you imagine we have the words like "cryptogenic" and "idiopathic", which essentially mean "I don’t know the reason"?

I don’t know how you would feel when the encounter changes from a medical doctor to a mechanic, who frowns upon the breakdown of your Volvo and then comes up with a brilliant diagnosis of "idiopathic vehicle breakdown." Instead of fixing the car, the mechanic can learn from the vocabulary of medical doctors. Clearly, he will feel relieved to tell his customer that the problem is an "idiosyncratic" one, rather than making an abject apology that "the problem will simply come and go at any moment – the frequency and timing of which we can’t predict."

My salute to the medical school where I learned the splendid words "idiopathic", "cryptogenic" and "idiosyncratic." Learn to greet every problem, from the alpha to the omega, with these big words, somehow managing to sound knowledgeable with them, and you will qualify as a fully competent doctor.