Medical jargon and understandability

5 Replies
Categories: Comics, Medicine

Not long ago, my (non-medical) fiance Luke pointed out, over the years since I’ve been in medical school, that my conversations with my med school friends have become more and more incoherent from his perspective. This isn’t really surprising, considering the huge amount of vocabulary that gets taught, especially within the first 2 years. Like many technical fields, a big part of medicine is learning to speak the language. What sets medicine apart from other jargon-heavy professions, however, is that doctors spend the majority of their time speaking with laypeople who are unfamiliar with that vast vocabulary that we’ve spent years building. The beginning of 3rd year was a bit of culture shock for me, after spending the first 2 years locked away in a lecture hall, when I realized that I had to learn how to communicate effectively with my patients (few of whom had any great measure of health literacy or any sort of higher education). When I first started med school, I thought that learning all the vocabulary in the first place would be the challenge. Now, I’m finding that explaining what I know in simple terms is much harder. Some words and phrases have become so natural to me that I’ve lost sight of whether or not they’re considered “normal” words that most people are familiar with.

For those of you that are working in/studying in similarly technical fields, have you found jargon creeping into your everyday speech? If so, do you struggle to communicate with those outside your field?

How to have an Atheist wedding

3 Replies
Categories: Ramblings

It’s been more than 2 years since Luke proposed to me and, after what may be the longest engagement in all of history, we finally have a wedding date scheduled and venue picked out. It seems that this getting married thing is actually going to happen! The details, though, of exactly how it’s going to happen are a bit more nebulous, for a few reasons. The first and most obvious is that neither of us has any religious affiliation (and are actually both strongly Atheist); the idea of a “traditional” church wedding is not only inappropriate, but on many levels, downright offensive to our sensibilities. More than that, though, is that we come from vastly different backgrounds: I, an immigrant from mainland China, and him, a Jew by ethnicity. Add in the fact that our parents have set out very few expectations, and “simple” questions like “What will the ceremony be like?” or “Who will officiate the marriage?” or even “What will our vows sound like?” suddenly seem not so simple anymore.

I like to joke that all I really want in a wedding is to get dressed up and look pretty, eat good food, and get presents. That’s probably not too far from the mark. Call me cynical, but the idea of listening to hours of cheesy readings (be they religious or not) and making unrealistic declarations of eternal love and commitment doesn’t appeal to me in the least, and I would probably be happy to minimize the ceremony in favor of the reception.

As I mentioned before, so far, we’ve managed to book and venue and set a date. We had actually strongly considered the possibility of getting married at the Science Museum (and I must admit that the idea of doing this appealed to me quite a bit, as an analogy to the church in a Christian wedding), but ultimately settled on a small nature reserve with a beautiful garden and just enough room. It will be small wedding, largely because I don’t have a great deal of family here in the States (and, having immigrated when I was 7, would probably not recognize most of the extended family that I have in China).

Playing doctor

2 Replies
Categories: Comics, Medicine

It’s Halloween, and everyone is playing dress-up. The funny thing is that I feel like I’ve been playing dress-up every day for the past year. I alluded before to how the practice of medicine is, in large part, about putting on a show, and I feel like, as a medical student, this is more true than at any other stage of training. We’re not only trying to convince our patients, our residents, and our attendings of how competent we are, but I think, to an extent, also ourselves. It’s no wonder that impostor syndrome is rampant among the med student population.

When I was doing my clinical rotations as a 3rd year, I was often told that I should strive to have my patients regard me as “their doctor.” It wasn’t rare for my superiors to introduce me as “Student Doctor” (which, though technically correct, is a title that is, in my opinion, designed to mislead patients) or “Doctor,” and I occasionally even dared to use the “Student Doctor” moniker to refer to myself. The truth is that I’m closer to being a “real” doctor than I’d like to think. But until then, I’ll keep putting on my costume and playing my part. Fake it ’til you make it, right?

Process of elimination

3 Replies
Categories: Comics, Medicine

The studying continues, despite the fact that I’ve forgotten quite a bit of the medical knowledge that I once had. I’ve made it a point to try to do a set of practice questions every day and, despite the fact that I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing when I stumble through the questions, I seem to be doing better than I expected. I find that in most cases when I get the correct answer, it isn’t because I know my stuff. More often than not, it’s because I had some vague intuition that one of the answers felt more friendly than the others. I guess I should be glad that the questions are multiple-choice!

Medical knowledge during med school

3 Replies
Categories: Comics, Medicine

So… I’m still studying for USMLE Step 2. I’ve been slowly but surely making my way through my admittedly over-ambitious stack of review books and practice questions and, as I’ve been doing so, I’m realizing more and more that I’ve forgotten an enormous amount of information since I took Step 1 a year and a half ago. It would have been bad enough if I had gone straight through to 4th year, but taking a research year means that my brain has become quite the rust bucket in these past few months. I hope that I’ll be able to brush off some of these cobwebs in time to not fail.

Meanwhile, my 4th year friends seems to be in much the same state as myself. Many of them have already completed their important rotations are now cruising along toward graduation. They say that 4th year is like having a vacation for half a year. I certainly hope that that will be true for me next year. Is it too early for me to have senioritis?