English Medical Writing and Human Emotions:
Confidence and Empathy
As many within the English medical writing community become more sensitive and understanding, some writers are increasingly careful to include empathy as an important factor in good medical writing.
Another essay at this site, Universal English Medical Writing, provides the sample below as another facet of what accessible English medical writing might look like:
A presbyopic patient, one who is experiencing difficulty with accommodating various focal lengths, will often come in to the office with a chief complaint of difficulty in reading menus or small print.
Using medical terminology like this reaches beyond accessibility and enters the realm of confidence, giving patients the confidence to speak more clearly to their doctor about their medical problems. This medical writing also allows them to identify their feelings with the English used within the general public, which brings us to the important issue of empathy.
Emphasizing empathy is important. When the general public reads English writing about medical issues, it is important that they feel that these are normal problems. We do not want readers with medical problems to think that they are odd or unique cases. It is bad enough that the readers have medical problems and feel ill and/or scared. Many people reading medical materials are reading them because of their own medical problems. This is not their normal pleasure reading. Good medical writing can help people. Bad medical writing can make them feel worse and frighten them. We do not want to do that. If the reader thinks that they are the only person to ever have experienced the symptoms or disease that they currently are dealing with, they will certainly feel even worse.
One way to set the English medical writing tone is with an example. Writing about a hypothetical case can provide such an example. If I were writing medical literature designed to inform readers of the problems of computer use, I might create a story about an imaginary patient and write about her. Let’s call this patient Patty. I might write something as follows:
Patty, a data entry specialist, recently entered my office with blurred vision, complaining of tired, dry eyes. After interviewing Patty, I found she was experiencing a common medical problem. As we spend more and more time on computers, we are seeing increasing numbers of patients in offices everywhere with similar medical complaints. These complaints center around dry, irritated eyes, difficulty in wearing contact lenses, and frequent headaches. Patty was spending more than eight hours a day at her computer. She was not blinking completely and her examination revealed that she had a diminished tear break-up time. Patty was diagnosed with garden variety Computer Vision Syndrome.
If you examine the above writing sample, you will see that it is a sample of medical English writing that: (1) describes the symptoms; (2) shows what causes them; and (3) provides empathy for anyone reading this literature. They can see that they are not alone. Good English medical writing for patients remembers that patients are human beings and has empathy for them. We hope you will remember this when you write English medical literature for patients.
医学英語翻訳、医学英文校正サービス （ 英文ネイティブチェック ） 等につきましては、代表者連絡先 ： honyaku@excom-system.com までご連絡ください。
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