Why does medical terminology exist

Disorders were described using a medical label or a lay label counterbalanced across participants, so no participant saw both the medical and lay label for the same disorder. Information regarding the justification and verification of these categories can be found elsewhere Young et al. Table 1. List of lay and medical labels used and associated category assignments.

Importantly, every questionnaire contained scenarios describing each of the eight recently medicalized disorders, and eight established disorders total of 16 hypothetical health scenarios. Based on previous work Young et al.

Mean urgency ratings as a function of the type of disorder and type of language used are shown in Table 2. Table 2. Mean urgency ratings as a function of the type of disorder and type of language used. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether the use of medical labels influences health-care-seeking behavior in healthy young adults. To that end, we conducted an experimental questionnaire-based study where participants were asked to rate how urgently they would seek medical care after imagining that they were experiencing the listed cluster of symptoms and had learned that their symptoms were consistent with a provided potential diagnosis.

In order to isolate the role of medical terminology on reported urgency of care-seeking behavior or self-triage decision-making , participants were asked to report how quickly they would seek care for disorders that were labeled using either lay-language terminology e.

In summary, the results of the present study indicate that when diseases were presented using their medical terminology label e. Further, participants appear to demonstrate this differential weighting of medical terminology primarily for medical disorders that have been recently medicalized e. The results from this study support the notion that medical terminology influences the urgency with which individuals report that they would seek medical care.

It is important to note that the recently medicalized and the established diseases do differ in severity Young et al. It is also possible that participants interpreted the urgency scale in this study inappropriately and relied on perceptions of illness base rates to ground their ratings of urgency, meaning that they may have reported that they would seek care more urgently for disorders they perceived to have higher base rates.

This possibility seems unlikely, given that Young et al. Young et al. In the present study, medical labels, compared to their lay English equivalent, were associated with higher urgency ratings in recently medicalized disorders, but no such pattern was seen in established disorders. This result replicates a similar pattern of results that was reported by Young et al.

We propose that medical labels may induce uncertainty in lay populations; perhaps the labels sound unfamiliar, which may underlie the increased urgency ratings seen here.

Song and Schwarz found that food additives were perceived as riskier when their names were harder to pronounce, an effect that was mediated by the perceived familiarity of the names. This fluency of processing acts as a heuristic cue for intuitive judgments of risk Schwarz et al.

Dohle and Siegrist also found fluency of name pronunciation to influence perceptions of drug risk. Even when individuals were presented with an attribute that was easier to evaluate, like price, the name of the drug was an important criterion for most participants for evaluating side effects and willingness to purchase.

It is important to recognize that this fluency effect is dependent on the context of the initial judgment. Previous studies report reverse fluency effects, where disfluency is interpreted positively, in instances where traits associated with disfluency, like unfamiliarity, were considered positive Pocheptsova et al. When asked to estimate the likelihood of FDA approval, individuals who had rated the drug names for advancedness perceived the complex drug names as more likely to be approved.

In contrast, individuals who had rated the names for riskiness perceived complex names as less likely to be approved. The context of a judgment e. The present study represents a situation where disfluency may be interpreted as uncertainty and associated with increased urgency to seek medical care.

Considering that the effect of heuristic cues is more pronounced when individuals are under stress Chaiken, or in the presence of uncertainty Kahneman, , decision-making, when ill and potentially facing uncertain medical terminology or diagnoses, can be especially prone to biases that may negatively impact individual or public health.

Therefore, patient-generated data in the context of actual decisions may show an even greater effect of newly medicalized terms on care-seeking urgency; however, this was beyond the scope of this study. This induction of uncertainty may mimic the pattern of results seen in Cooper and Humphreys , where uncertainty resulted in increased ratings of urgency for disorders that were moderate or high in severity.

Interestingly, Hall et al. It is possible then, that the results presented here demonstrate not an uncertainty of diagnosis, but an uncertainty of what the newly medicalized terminology means.

Research on the health communication via medical disclosure and consent documentation also found that patients experienced less uncertainty when viewing documentation with both medical terminology and their corresponding lay terminology, than with just the medical terminology alone Donovan et al.

Within the taxonomy of uncertainty in health communication established by Babrow et al. The uncertainty of what newly medicalized terminology may mean can be described as a lack of clarity, a sub-domain of quality of information, whereas an uncertainty of diagnosis would fall within the domain of probability—the perceived likelihood of a particular outcome or the presence of a range of possibilities Babrow et al.

The source of uncertainty can influence the impact of uncertainty on decision, as demonstrated by the divergent effects of uncertainty on ratings of self-reported care-seeking urgency observed in this study and Hall et al. Finally, recent research has demonstrated a strong role for the linguistic properties of product labels in decisions of risk—if a food additive Song and Schwarz, or drug Dohle and Siegrist, was difficult to pronounce, it was considered to be more risky than one that was easy to pronounce.

If such simple linguistic phenomena, such as ease of pronunciation, or having English language versus Latinate-sounding terminology in medicine Eva et al. Tasso et al. For example, participants perceived drug names like Dermosan, referring to its expected outcome of healthy san skin dermo , to be more effective and less risky than names like Dermomal, referring to its target health issue of unhealthy mal skin dermo.

Ethical issues with regards to language choice arise when language is shown to readily bias perceptions and health behavior intention. Bokhour and Kressin expressed a similar concern toward potentially misinterpreted disorder labels, like hypertension, suggesting individual labels may carry their own semantic and cognitive biases.

Despite being an established medical label for high blood pressure due to elevated arterial tension, hypertension is often misinterpreted as excessive general tension or stress. Associations between blood pressure and stress, although commonly held, remain controversial and unclear, especially with regards to the etiology and management of hypertension Bokhour and Kressin, As a result, patients may rely on psychological stress relief and discount the value of non-psychological interventions like diet, exercise, or antihypertensive medication.

The presentation of this medical label, or other potentially misinterpreted labels, may influence self-triage, self-care management, and medication adherence Bokhour and Kressin, New medical labels should consider conflicting perceptions of lay labels and potential misinterpretations, as well as the implicit influence of language on perception and decision-making.

Further research should investigate label-specific biases to inform appropriate language choice for health communications, as well as methods for preventing cognitive biases like fluency. Individuals who chewed on a cereal bar while reading food additive names reported similar levels of risk perception for both easy-to-pronounce names and hard-to-pronounce names. Topolinski and Strack took these findings as support for the notion that the ease of covert sensorimotor simulation drives fluency-based cognitive biases.

Secondary sensorimotor tasks block these simulations, thereby reducing fluency effect. Whereas other approaches require additional post hoc processing to correct biases, the process proposed by Topolinski and Strack prevents the biases by blocking the processes responsible and is more applicable to the context of online health information seeking, where additional judgmental corrections are not convenient or readily available.

This study is not without limitations. A population of healthy undergraduates was used, and asked to imagine hypothetical medical scenarios. While this is not perfectly equivalent to individuals in crisis making decisions of when to seek care, we believe that the protocol used here, and in previous work Cooper and Humphreys, ; Hall et al.

Notably, these results do not perfectly generalize to a patient population, an older or less educated population Frewer et al. Additionally, this study was designed as a within-subjects study, with little opportunity to investigate the role of culture e.

This study was also unable to investigate the likely iterative and interactional effects of individuals seeking information to help support self-triage decision-making. While beyond the scope of this study, the influence of culture, individual differences, and contextual and interactive factors remain important avenues for future research. Finally, any effects of terminology need to be interpreted within a particular linguistic and cultural context, and it remains unclear the extent to which these results would generalize to languages other than English, or other cultural contexts.

Importantly, this study clearly identifies terminology as an influence on self-reported urgency to seek medical care. Understanding the specific factors that underlie the influence of medical terminology, identifying influences on patient decisions to seek care, and evaluating their interactions are important for improving medical communication generally and patient—physician communication specifically, as well as the effective design and use of public health campaigns.

Consistent with findings that lay labels are perceived as less severe, less representative of disease, and more prevalent Young et al. Based on this growing body of work, physicians should also avoid instances where particular labels may be misinterpreted and as a result, undermine treatment Bokhour and Kressin, The optimal terminology to be used by physicians in consultations depends on the language used by patients and the intended outcome. Williams and Ogden found increased patient—physician rapport, patient communication comfort, and patient compliance intent when physicians used the same labels as their patients.

The importance of medical terminology can also be observed outside of a physical patient—physician interaction. This study focused on the terminology seen in the context of fictional self-triage decisions, the role of uncertainty in light of different self-posited diagnoses is particularly important given our technologically and informationally rich environment, where individuals seek much of their health information online. With individuals reporting self-triage as one of the primary reasons for online health information seeking Bowes et al.

Further, information on the Internet is not always reliable Diaz et al. With advances in information technology, the importance of terminology also extends to interactions with tools for medical decision-making Nijland et al. Decision aids, like the strategy for off-site rapid triage, a web-based decision aid designed in response to the H1N1 influenza pandemic, aim to provide better informed decision-making during times of medical crisis Kellermann et al. Dolan et al. The present findings demonstrate that language of presentation can be a crucial consideration for patient communication, including the methods for designing decision-aid tools.

Participants were briefed regarding the study protocol by MD and provided written consent. This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of the McMaster University Research Ethics Board with written informed consent from all participants.

All participants gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. MD aided in the conceptualization and execution of the study. She was primarily responsible for data analysis and partial drafting of the manuscript. She critically reviewed the manuscript and approved its final form. KH aided in the conceptualization of the study, and assisted with data analysis and interpretation.

She critically revised the manuscript and approved its final form. TL assisted in data interpretation and critical revisions of the manuscript. He approved the final manuscript. MY assisted in the conceptualization of the study, assisted in data analysis and interpretation, critical review of the manuscript, and approved of its final form.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The authors would like to thank the members of the Cognitive Science Laboratory at McMaster University for their assistance throughout this project. Babrow, A. The many meanings of uncertainty in illness: toward a systematic accounting. Health Commun. Benigeri, M. Most common ideas include lack of comprehension, low medical literacy and complexity of medical language.

Some authors insist on existence of "medical sublanguage", due to plenty of terminology, synonymic words and constructions, which can completely replace "normal" language in some situations. Despite this development, cultural, geographical and historical influence still brings confusion in terminology.

Variety of terms, which describe the same structure or process, variety of eponyms, which differ from country to county, frequently bring confusion, especially in patients, who are usually not conceived on what can the information be about.

If someone confuses the terminology, putting the wrong condition or procedure into the chart, this can make a huge difference in the care the patient receives. Treatment may be less effective, or in some cases, dangerous. When all members of a team know medical terminology, they can also help the patient learn what those terms mean. Patient education helps patients become a more active part of their care team, leading to improved satisfaction.

Knowing medical terminology can also help you avoid making coding or billing mistakes that a patient may have to call to correct—a major patient dissatisfier. Healthcare professionals may see dozens of patients every day. To provide more efficient care, physicians or nurses may write quickly and scribble common abbreviations.

All members of the care team should be able to understand these abbreviations and terms to provide the best care. If you are looking to improve your medical terminology skills to enhance your job performance or make yourself a strong candidate for a healthcare position, the Portland Community College online Medical Terminology course can help you.