The Secret Language of Doctors

Doctor Brian Goldman is an Emergency Room Physician in Toronto. He is also host of the CBC program White Coat/Black Art. Despite the title this book is more an assessment of the state of Medical Health Care in North America than a dictionary of medical slang/argot/jargon.

In his position he gets to see acutely ill patients but often does not get to provide after care. However, he works in a system that rewards through-put and not quality of care and therefore pays a doctor more for dealing with a cold, a cut, or a broken arm; than spending the time it would take to counsel a patient about the lifestyle choices that underlie their medical issues. Doctors have come to be regarded as wizards who can cure all ills whereas too many medical conditions are the result of lifestyle choices—smoking, diet, exercise. Rather than depend on doctors and medical science to provide all the answers patients need to take responsibility for their own health.

The language thrown around hospitals between nurses and doctors therefore becomes both a means of transmitting a great deal of information in as few words as possible and an expression of their frustration—blowing off steam. Of making derogatory comments in a language that the public hopefully will not understand or misinterpret.

Most of us look to hospitals as centres of healing, in French the word is Hotel Dieu. Imagine then the let-down involved in learning that nurses treat each other in an appalling fashion with a definite pecking order that heaps abuse on new recruits. That rather than being patient centred doctors shunt patients around to ensure they don't die on their watch and refuse admissions to their wards or engage in delaying strategies that endanger patient's health. That various specialities demean one another and use derogatory language. If this is how they treat one another what does it say about their patient care.