I am in incredible pain. I’m sitting in a small medical office that backs onto an exercise studio. My new physio sits across from me. He turns to me and says:
“Your pain is neuropathic.”
The word slams into me. I don’t know what it means, but I know a neurologist was a brain doctor, so he must be saying: You have a problem with your brain.
My heart drops deep towards my stomach.
But the physio has been here before. And with gentle words he catches my fear: “It just means you have pain in your nerves.”
I exhale. The tension melts from my shoulders like ice under sunlight. My brain is fine. The pain is still there, of course, but it no longer holds the same weight I carried moments ago.
My terror was not from his diagnosis. It was simply from a word I did not know.
This is a common experience
You’ve probably been there before.
Maybe sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting anxiously for test results. The doc walks in and says, “Your results are negative.”
For a split second, the panic sets in. Negative, after all, sounds bad. But in the medical community, it’s good news. The relief washes over you.
Then there’s the reverse: “Your tumor is progressing.” That sounds like you’re making great progress, congrats! Except here, progress means the cancer is getting worse. It’s the exact opposite of what you want to hear.
The words they are using are medical jargon. These are the special words or phrases used by those in medicine that are difficult for outsiders (like us) to understand.
The evidence suggests that the most highly-rated aspect that defines a good doctor is “humaneness.” But medical jargon is anything but human.
Those little language traps, the disconnect between medical terms and everyday words, are real barriers to good medical care.
When people misunderstand their diagnosis or treatment plan, they make bad decisions about their health. And yet, despite knowing this, medical jargon is still everywhere.
What the research says
A few years ago, Dr. Rachael Gotlieb from the University of Minnesota ran a research study to find out what people knew about medical jargon.
To do this, she hit the bustling Minnesota State Fair, where the perfume of deep fryers working overtime to crisp everything from cheese curds to chocolate bars hangs thick in the air.
She surveyed 215 people and asked them to interpret common medical phrases – words like negative, positive, remarkable, and impressive – and rate if they were used for good, bad or neutral news.
What it revealed is hard evidence that some words that mean one thing in medicine and something totally different in everyday life:
- 96% knew that a “negative cancer screening” was good news. (In part thanks to COVID; people now know negative means no infection.)
- Only 79% knew that a “progressing tumor” was bad. (Progress usually means something is getting better, so the confusion makes sense.)
- Just 67% understood that “positive lymph nodes” meant the cancer had spread. (“Positive” is good outside of medicine, which makes this tricky.)
- Only 21% knew that “impressive radiography” was bad news. (To most, impressive means great! but in medicine, it often means alarming.)
- A mere 9% could define “febrile.” (Despite its use in hospitals, most people – myself included – had no idea it meant feverish.)
They also tested whether plain language makes things more clear. Spoiler, it did.
The sentence “Your blood test shows no infection” was understood by 98% of people. Its medical alternative “Your blood culture was negative” was only understood by 87%.
That means that 1 in 10 people will leave their doctor with an entirely different understanding of their diagnosis if the doctor uses jargon, than if they use simple everyday words.
Likewise, the phrase ‘Nothing by mouth’ was understood by 75%. Which to me still seems high compared to ‘don’t eat or drink’…
But its medical alternative, ‘NPO,’ is only known by 11% of the population. Because it’s meaningless. It’s the medical shorthand for ‘Nil Per Os’ which is Latin for ‘Don’t put stuff in your gob’.
At such a low rate of comprehension, nearly every single person who hears this would not be able to do what they need to do to prepare for surgery. That’s a terrible situation to be in.
Jargon is killing people
Jargon isn’t just a medical problem.
Ever tried reading a legal contract? Words like indemnify and force majeure make it almost impossible to understand what you’re actually agreeing to.
Car mechanics throw around terms like differential and camshaft timing, leaving you nodding along while secretly wondering if your car is on its last legs.
In most industries, jargon is frustrating. In medicine, it’s deadly.
Medical language is supposed to be precise. But when doctors use it with patients, it has real, immediate consequences.
A missed symptom. The wrong medication. A treatment plan that can’t be followed. A patient who never returns because they feel confused and scared.
The whole system suffers: patients get worse care, doctors grow more frustrated, and national healthcare takes a dive.
And the people already at a disadvantage – those with lower literacy skills, non-native English speakers, and anyone with cognitive impairments – are the people who suffer most.
Why doctors continue to use jargon
If medical jargon causes so many problems, why do doctors keep using it? The short answer: habit, speed, and tradition.
In a hospital, jargon lets medical teams communicate with quick precision. A surgeon doesn’t have to spend the time to say, “This X-ray looks normal” when they can just say, “unremarkable.”
But what works between doctors doesn’t always work with patients. When jargon spills over into the conversations they’re having with the people they’re treating, it becomes a wall instead of a bridge.
There’s also the idea of ‘jargon oblivion.’ This is a blind spot experts have, where they assume that certain words are common knowledge.
A doctor might avoid the most technical terms but still say things like grossly intact or occult infection, not realising these sound like nonsense to the average person.
And then there’s tradition. Medicine has been using the same terms for decades, sometimes centuries. Changing that takes more than awareness, it takes a conscious effort to break old systems.
But change can be dangerous. When a human life is on the line, you need everyone on the same page. You need communication that’s accurate, established and precise. That’s a fair critique.
But precision is useless if the patient doesn’t understand what you’re saying.
The fix is to know your audience
The solution to medical jargon isn’t to have doctor’s dumb down information. And it’s certainly not to take it away from doctors talking to other doctors.
It’s about those in the medical field being aware of who they’re talking to.
A doctor can have all the right answers, but if the patient walks away confused, the conversation has failed.
I am not a doctor. But as a patient, here’s how I see healthcare providers can do better:
- Use plain language with patients. I’d rather hear ‘I don’t know what’s causing it yet’, than ‘your condition is idiopathic,’ which feels like an insult.
- Check for understanding. After giving a diagnosis, patients should be able to explain what they heard in their own words. And doctors should ask for this. For example, “what time do you stop eating tonight?” is an easy way to sense-check for “you need to avoid food for 12 hours.”
- Use analogies and comparisons. A simple example can make a medical concept click. “Your arteries are partially occluded,” is much clearer expressed as “It’s like a clogged pipe. The blood isn’t flowing as well as it should.”
- Ditch abbreviations and acronyms. Terms like NPO and CBC might be second nature to doctors, but they’re a jumble of letters to most patients. Get rid of them.
This doesn’t just apply to conversations in the clinic. Patients now have real-time access to their medical records through digital health portals. But if those records are packed with jargon, they might as well be written in another language.
There’s a common joke about doctor’s signatures being illegible. And I say, if there’s too much jargon involved, a diagnosis can feel exactly the same.
If healthcare is truly about helping people, then making information clear and accessible should be the priority.
Final thoughts
I am recovering. Slowly. Everything still hurts. But I have more information. Better still, it’s information that I can understand. And my physio is, ultimately, wonderful.
But I still believe medical jargon is a barrier. It turns life-changing conversations into puzzles that patients shouldn’t have to solve.
Shifting to everyday language helps patients grasp their diagnoses, treatment options, and next steps. This is just as important as the treatment itself.
If healthcare is meant to serve patients, then clear communication matters. And perhaps I – and others – will have less moments of pure panic next time round.
