Medical language frequently contains linguistic forms that serve to create a social distance between physicians and patients. This distance develops not only out of poor communication with the patient, but also, and more importantly, arises as the language that a physician uses comes to modulate his or her experience of the patient. It is suggested that some of the problem lies in the very nature of language itself, and that further fault can be found in the particular structures of Western (...) language. Unfortunately, however, medical language has adopted special forms and metaphors which further serve to create distance. (shrink)

Part personal documentary, part exercise in medical semantics, this essay brings the analytical tools of a linguist and the human perspective of a patient receiving treatment in the American health care system to bear on the language we use—for the most part unconsciously—to talk about illness and disease. Topics to be explored include linguistic ramifications of the illness/disease distinction; referring expressions for health disorders; the “linguistic construction” of disease (what's in a name?); the “translation” of biomedical information from the specialists' (...) dialect into everyday idiom; and the metaphoric/symbolic dimension of body-parts and their afflictions. (shrink)