Patients are more inclined to think that their condition is serious

Dec 9, 2008 09:33 GMT  ·  By
When talking to patients, doctors should present their conditions thoroughly and calmly
   When talking to patients, doctors should present their conditions thoroughly and calmly

Doctors who use very technical terms when describing a disease to their patients are more likely to scare the people seeking their help than those who introduce medical conditions with their lay terms, instead of the correct medical ones. When hearing words they don't understand, especially in relation to their health, people tend to get scared and imagine that the condition they are suffering from is much more serious than it actually is.

"A simple switch in terminology can result in a real bias in perception. These findings have implications for many areas, including medical communication with the public, corporate advertising and public policy," argues McMaster University Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour graduate student, Meredith Young, one of the lead authors of the current study, which was published in the journal PloS ONE.

"A lot of people have become critical of what is sometimes called 'disease-mongering' – or defining more and more conditions as diseases when they were previously just in the range of normal health, and a change in language certainly seems to accompany this. We don't mean to dismiss any of the recently medicalized conditions we tested as trivial. Rather, because public understanding of these conditions is still in flux, they are an excellent place to examine how different terminology impacts this understanding," adds Karin Humphreys, assistant professor at the same Department.   Experts draw attention to the fact that the way people understand their disease is crucial to the way they will go about counteracting it afterwards. If they understand exactly what their physician is talking about, then they will most likely follow the correct course of action. However, if the information is not transmitted properly, patients may be prompted to employ very powerful drugs, to rid themselves of their alleged serious condition.   Experts encourage caregivers to use the lay terms for the diseases as often as possible, so as to ensure that people understand exactly what they are up against. "This is particularly important when you have lots of conditions that have recently become medicalized, some of them possibly through the influence of pharmaceutical companies, who want to make you think that you have a disease that will need to be treated with a drug," concludes Humphreys.