Do laypersons understand medical terms? [closed]

Solution 1:

Translation is a difficult task. Cultures are different, situations are different, histories are different.

English is interesting because it has a mixed heritage for many medical terms. For many medical situations there is a basic English term, and there is a Latin technical term, and there might possibly be a Greek or even another Latin term. Part of a physicians training (in the US at least) is learning how to convert a patient's vague non-technical words into the more precise, Latinate technical terms (this is called 'processing').

For example, a patient may say "I'm having trouble breathing". By asking more questions, the physician can decide between things and labeling them more technically: if it is inflammation in the throat (laryngitis a common), wheezing (bronchitis) or shortness of breath (dyspnea, neologism from Greek. generally entirely unknown, a medically common word and condition, but not in any online etymology).

For another example, to expel liquid from the urinary bladder, the vulgar juvenile word is 'to piss' (an Anglo-French borrowing). But everyone is comfortable with the more erudite 'urinate' a Late Latin (=Medieval/Ecclesiastical Latin) neologism. This is also what physicians use except when they want to hide things a little and then they use 'micturate'.

Most English speaking people don't have education in Latin or Greek, so most of those terms are etymologically opaque. There's actually a bit of obscurantism, whether by logical depth of scientific distinction or intentional euphemism/hiding by the clinician for social reasons (not to freak out the patient) or ego (to make one seem smarter). The patient may well have heard a commercial so they have an idea that 'rhinitis' is something like a cold but they will just say 'my nose is stuffed up'. But 'dyspnea'? The patient may say they have trouble breathing, but they won't recognize the term 'dyspnea' if they see what the doc is writing down.

My limited perception of Mandarin Chinese is that medical terms are in general 'transparent'. The English label 'pulmonologist' is usually rendered in Chinese as '肺科医生' which is more literally 'lung (department) doctor'. English speakers know 'lung' and 'doctor', but 'pulmono-' is just as foreign as the Chinese is to them (they may have trouble pronouncing it even). Some Germanic languages are similarly namely German which has an easy method of technical term formation from basic words (which English does not share). French on the other hand is more like English in that its medical vocabulary is incomprehensible to the general public.

Of your list above, the following are understandable by the general US populace (who haven't experienced the problem personally):

• laryngitis - a common enough thing used by non-clinicians as a fancy synonym for sore throat
• apnea - a popular notion, again fancy for snoring (or rather the cause of snoring)
• rhinoplasty - elective plastic surgery is as common in the US as in China, so this is a well known synonym for 'nose job'
• tracheotomy - every other movie comedy seems to have a scene where the protagonist has to perform an emergency tracheotomy on some one choking in a restaurant because they saw how to do it on TV (note: tracheotomy is the procedure, tracheostomy is the hole itself)

All the other words on the list are highly technical terms. Most high-school graduates would never have seen these terms before but could guess at some of the meanings with some non-trivial accuracy. However these words should all be explained to non-medical readers in the US.

This is not to say that the education system in the US is not teaching students the right things. At some point, the basic English vocabulary just does not cover the explosion of technical scientific minutiae in medicine. It takes years of higher learning (medical school) to master these terms. It's just that the culture (and the word forming tradition of English culture) lends itself to using obscure Latin and Greek rather than simpler already known Germanic roots.

A more quantitative way to say this would be to give you their frequency in non-medical contexts. All these terms I'd expect to be well out of the top 20-30K working vocabulary of most US adults.

TL;DR: No need to feel bad. Most of the terms in your list are entirely opaque to non-medical people. There is a 'code' to break, and it is breakable by learning a good set of body parts and such: brady- = slow, tachy- = fast, card- = heart, -pnea = breathing so bradycardia = slow heart rate, tachypnea, fast breathing rate.

Solution 2:

People with some knowledge of classical languages such as Greek and Latin can usually work out what those terms mean. For example 'rhin' refers to the the nose and 'tachy' means speedy.

Biologists too should be able to make a good guess.

These days, a classical education is relatively rare and so I suspect the majority of the population would only know these words if they or a close friend or relative had suffered from such a condition.

Solution 3:

My personal reaction to your list:

• laryngitis — I think that means a sore throat.
• laryngoscopy — I've never seen this word, but from "-scopy" I suppose it's a throat examination.
• pulmonary — I think that's something to do with the heart.
• pulmonologist — A specialist in "pulmonary", I suppose. But if those two words weren't adjacent in your list I might miss the connection.
• apnea — Vaguely sounds scary. A hole in the heart?
• tracheostomy — That might be the dramatic trick where they push a ball-point pen into the throat for emergency breathing, but I'm not confident.

All the others give the strong feeling of being medical terms — I know they are not plants for example — and yet I can't define them at all.

That's despite the fact that I also speak Spanish well, and some French, and I enjoy recognizing the many Latin roots among these languages, and I enjoy reading about word etymologies (I'm just trying to clarify I'm not a moron!); apparently that is not enough for these words.

So "no" is the answer to your question!

Someone without medical training will understand more words on that list if someone in their life has experienced the conditions, or maybe if they watch medical dramas on TV. But I wouldn't be surprised to meet a native English speaker who could define nothing on your list.

For what it's worth, the spell checker in my Firefox browser recognizes only "rhinitis", "laryngitis", "pulmonary", and "rhinoplasty", and is confused by all the others.

"Laryngitis" is the only one I feel I should know. I've heard it enough times. The others feel like jargon used only by doctors.

I recently read a UK news article about doctors being urged to use "plain English" terms instead, precisely because the medical terms can be so unfamiliar and scary to patients:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-45394620

That article tells me that "pulmonary" means lung, not heart. I also checked the others and it turns out that "apnea" means "not breathing", and "laryngitis" means a problem with the voice, not precisely "sore throat", from "larynx" meaning voice box. You see? I haven't a clue.