Research has shown that even professional and medical terminology that doctors use so commonly can lead to confusion in that many patients do not understand it.
Doctors or patients who have received some education have problems such as the fact that some patients perceive the content as completely opposite. Accordingly, it is the opinion of experts that standardized phrases are needed to narrow the gap.
On the 1st local time, the results of a large-scale study on 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 actual clinical settings, the use of professional and medical terminology by doctors is accepted as an issue to be avoided. This is because confusion is inevitable in that there is a risk that the patient will not understand it properly.
However, in various studies, an unavoidable situation called ‘technical term oblivion’ has also been reported. This is when a doctor tries to avoid using specialized or medical terminology, but is unaware that the word itself is a technical term.
This is also the reason why a research team led by Professor Rachael Gotlieb of the University of Minnesota Medical School conducted a study on this gap. This is to find out whether real patients properly recognize these terms.
Accordingly, the research team showed 215 adults sentences using technical terms and sentences that did not, through short-answer and multiple-choice questions, and evaluated their level of understanding.
As a result, 96% of the patients who knew that it was not cancer for ‘Your cancer screening result was negative’ showed a higher understanding of positive and negative than expected.
However, only 79% of patients understood that the “tumor is progressing” explanation meant that the cancer was spreading. 21% didn’t think things were getting worse.
If you go a little more professionally, the level of understanding is greatly reduced. For example, only 80% of the phrase ‘there is no noticeable chest radiography result’ was recognized as positive news.
In particular, when asked to describe a chest radiograph as “impressive,” only 21% accepted the word as bad news. This means that 8 out of 10 people do not recognize it properly.
Likewise, only 41% of patients knew that being ‘neurologically sound’ was good news. Only 33% of respondents knew that their positive nodes had spread their cancer.
In that sense, the research team emphasized that the basis for the patient to better understand the doctor’s words is laid 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 meaningful in that it is the world’s first study to evaluate patients’ understanding of general professional and medical terminology,” and “It shows that doctors need to pay more attention to these areas.”
He continued, “For example, it is correct to use the word ‘don’t eat anything’ given that a quarter of patients do not understand the word ‘do not take oral intake’ properly.” It takes effort to think about phrases, etc.”