This week’s family medicine assignment consists of thinking through the communication barrier between physician and patient. At the heart of the debate is the low health literacy levels in the general American population, and the disproportionately prevalent illiteracy in low socioeconomic areas. The logic goes that patient adherence to treatment is proportional to understanding of the diagnosis and treatment plan. Compounded by the advent of modern pharmaceutical innovations with its increasingly complicated drug regiments – diabetic drugs plans being a classic example – requires an increase in patient understanding. If, by improving physician communication skills, the treatment outcomes, patient satisfaction, and a sundry other consequences will potentially be found.
Put in other words: The first year medical student sets out to learn a foreign language. By the end of the student’s medical school career, the vocabulary will essentially double, an equivalent of learning a second language. For my first two years of medical school, I have learned how to understand, as well as verbally communicate, using modern medical-speak. But when I enter the family medicine out-patient clinic, and proceed to confer with the patient as if a peer — using terms like sigmoid and colostrum – twenty minutes of words falling upon deaf ear. I must relearn my mother tongue. I must serve as a translator between both world. It seems that many of us have forgotten our native language, in the process of learning medicine. To have spent 4 years of medical school + 3-6 years or residency to distill highly specific information about the latest scientific research into a few drops of clear, simple terms – that even the most uneducated of patients could take in – seems to be an essential, yet overlooked and neglected, role of every physician-turned-translator.
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