Okay, this is one of my medical writing beefs. When you write in the medical world, people are never people. They’re patients.
Well, that’s fine if you’re writing to doctors or nurses or hospital administrators, because that’s how they talk about the people who use their services. They’re patients.
But I have long maintained that people do not think of themselves as patients. In other words, your doctor may call you a patient, your insurance company may call you a patient, and the hospital lists you as a patient. But to you … you are a person. To your mom, you’re a person. To your friends, you’re a person.
Anyway, I was asked to write some materials for a medical company that would be sent to what the company also called patients. This is a whole genre of medical literature produced by drug and device companies–it’s called “patient literature.”
Well, I called the readers “people.” I’m going to change some details here so I can obscure the culprits, but when writing to dialysis patients, I wrote sentences that used phrases like, “People who need dialysis….” or “People who rely on dialysis…” or “As a person who needs regular dialysis….”
The company sent my material off to be reviewed by some nurses. That’s typical procedure and it’s a good idea, most of the time, since these are “front line” clinicians who can review my manuscript for accuracy. You would also think that they would be concerned that I made the right points. Instead, their main complaint, and it was a vehement one, was that I should use “dialysis patient” all the way through. That was what these people were, dialysis patients!
My reply was that they were dialysis patients to their caregivers, but that they thought of themselves as people who need dialysis. I was told that they ought to be thinking of themselves as dialysis patients, because that was what they are.
(This is another reason why non-writers reviewing materials should be filtered. The client felt that anything these nurses said trumped anything I might have to say, so the nurses won although they were wrong.)
The strangest thing happened. I got another job in another field, again writing some “patient literature” but this time it was for arthritis patients. Again, I don’t think anyone thinks of himself as a patient, so I wanted to say things like “people with arthritis…” or “as a person who has arthritis…” But I was admittedly a little bit scared.
The last brouhaha (about dialysis) had been a long drawn-out mess the company had been so utterly stubborn in the fact that people with diseases cease to be people and must think of themselves ever after as patients …. that I choked. I was nervous. Maybe this was a new trend in medicine. Maybe this was some new regulation. You never know. The dialysis company had been so unyielding that I wondered if this was not some universal trend.
I generated a few notes to show the arthritis company some ideas and I floated two terms by them. I used “people with arthritis” in a couple of places and I used “arthritis patient” somewhere else. I wanted to elicit a discussion on the terms.
It worked! The arthritis company told me to please avoid using the term “patient” when writing patient literature because people are people and nobody wants to think of himself as a patient. They acted for a minute like they weren’t sure why they hired me because I was so bad at patient literature.
I almost told them the story about the dialysis company, but I didn’t. So I’m telling you. The moral of this story is that sometimes non-writers will review your material and introduce changes that make it worse, not better, and you may be powerless to stop it.
Do not let that change what you think. You may not be able to save the brochure or the article … but please save your writing.
