Research has shown that even the professional and medical terminology that doctors so commonly use can lead to confusion as many patients do not understand it.
Doctors and patients who have received some education have problems such as the fact that some patients perceive the content as completely opposite. Consequently, it is the expert opinion that standardized sentences are needed to narrow the gap.
Earlier local time, the results of a large-scale study of the accuracy of patients’ understanding of medical terms were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.42972).
In today’s clinical settings, the use of professional and medical terminology by physicians is accepted as a problem to be avoided. This is because confusion is inevitable as there is a risk that the patient does not understand it correctly.
However, in various studies, an unavoidable situation called “technical term forgetting” has also been reported. This is when a doctor tries to avoid using specialist or medical terminology, but is unaware that the word itself is a technical term.
This is also why the research team led by University of Minnesota Medical School professor Rachael Gotlieb conducted a study precisely on this gap. This is to find out if real patients correctly recognize these terms.
As a result, the research team screened 215 sentences from adults who used technical terms and sentences who didn’t, through short-answer and multiple-choice questions, and rated their level of understanding.
As a result, 96% of patients who knew they were not cancer for “Cancer screening result was negative” showed greater understanding of positive and negative than expected.
However, only 79% of patients understood that the explanation “the tumor is progressing” meant that the cancer was spreading. 21% didn’t think things were getting any worse.
If you go a little more professionally, the level of understanding drops significantly. For example, only 80% of the phrase “no clear chest X-ray result” was recognized as positive news.
Notably, when asked to describe a chest X-ray as “impressive,” only 21% accepted the word as bad news. This means that 8 out of 10 people do not recognize it correctly.
Similarly, only 41% of patients knew that being “neurologically healthy” was good news. Only 33% of respondents knew that positive lymph nodes had spread the cancer.
In this sense, the research team underlined that the basis for the patient to better understand the doctor’s words is placed by paying very little attention.
For example, only 87% of patients understood the words “blood culture result is negative,” but 98% understood “blood test result is negative.”
Professor Rachel said: ‘It is significant in that it is the first study in the world to assess patients’ understanding of professional and general medical terminology’ and ‘It demonstrates that clinicians need to pay more attention to these areas.’
He continued: “For example, it is correct to use the word ‘do not eat anything’ since a quarter of patients do not understand the word ‘do not take oral intake’ correctly.” etc.”
