By Lawrence B. Erlich, M.D.
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You probably think that doctors speak English. For that matter, you
probably think that lawyers speak English. And you are almost correct. Both professions
actually speak their own dialect of English and at times the dialect is incomprensible to
anyone out of the profession.
I can't talk about legal jargon, since I am not a lawyer, but I can
talk about medical jargon, and it is not at all unusual for a doctor try to say something
from the witness stand only to find that judge and a jury understand it to have the
opposite meaning from what he intended. This extends not only to technical language, but
also to ordinarily three and four letter words. For example:
If a doctor say that a patient "admits" to something, he
does not mean that the person previously tried to deny it. Used in that way,
"admit" just means "said." Far more confusing is the statement,
"I don't know that is true." That statement sounds like a vague and courteous
contradiction of what you just said, but to a doctor it means, "It is not true,
nobody thinks that it is true, there is no evidence in the literature that it is true, and
anyone who could possibly think that it is true is a complete idiot." In other words,
them's fighting words to a doctor, but it sounds like anything but that to a layman.
By Lawrence B. Erlich, M.D. - Email: Phila57387@aol.com
