Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

To all my doctor, nurse, or med student friends.... Please tell me if this scenario sounds familiar:
Doctor: Sir, have you ever been diagnosed with hypertension?
Patient: No, but I have high blood pressure.

Now I'm not trying to make fun of people who don't know what "hypertension" is.  My point is that sometimes (ok, MOST of the time) medicine is confusing.  Not just for patients but for a meager med student like me.  I think the problem is that all these "doctor folks" decided that to distinguish themselves from mere mortals they must use big, long, hard-to-pronounce words that would take a person close to a decade to memorize and decipher.

I came to this conclusion yesterday while I was studying.  I came across a word that just made me stop in my tracks and say "HUH?!" (I actually said "WTF", but that's not ladylike).  The word was poikilothermia, it was listed as a symptoms of peripheral arterial disease.  I had to google it.  Even Wikepedia didn't have it, but did have "poikilotherm" which apparently means "An organism whose internal temperature varies considerably.... The term is used as a more exact description of the vernacular 'cold blooded'".  Basically, it means "cold feet".  So why couldn't they just say that in my book?

This is why it's so hard trying to become a doctor.  Why does everything have to have some big fancy name attached to it?  It's like they purposely make things harder for you to understand.  And not just as a medical student, but patients as well.  Doctor's tend to throw around these long winded words even to their patients:  "Mrs. Smith, have you experienced any dyspnea recently?"  Mrs. Smith, along with 90% of the population, has no clue what the hell "dyspnea" is, but is too embarrassed to ask.  So she just says "no." Well if this pretentious doctor had just asked if she had any trouble breathing, then maybe Mrs. Smith would have said "yes" and the doctor could properly diagnose her.

A communication gap like this can lead to lots of issues down the road.  When medical students have to memorize books and books full of this crazy medical lingo, it basically becomes their second language.  By the time they are doctors, they're fluent in it.  So much so that they forget that most everyone else speaks normal, including their patients.  For example a physician may say, "Mr. Black, your test results show that you have an elevated LDL and triglycerides, which means you have hypercholesterolemia and hyperlipidemia.  I'm going to start you on Artovastatin."  You may as well have been speaking Japanese.


An "empowered" patient (isn't that what all these articles online try to give you advice on?  "how to be an 'empowered' patient") may actually confront the doctor and say "HUH?!" or "WTF?"  But I'm guessing the majority of people may think that asking for clarification makes them look stupid.  Well, my new mission, in addition to passing my board exams, is to be a better physician by taking the time to explain things to my patients.  And to always ask at the end of every encounter, "Do you have any questions?"  Now I want each of you to make it your mission to always ask your own doctor to take a step back and talk to you in your own language so that you don't leave feeling more confused than before you walked in.

Knowing all these big words doesn't make a person any "smarter".  It just means they spent four years relying on Wikepedia to get them through med school.