Attempting to learn medicine vocabulary without understanding the underlying knowledge base is quite hard. Taking a readymade deck of corresponding vocabulary usually leads to attempting to learn something without understanding. That leads to forgotten cards and is ineffective.
Since I don’t have the books around me, I’ll have to write from memory without specific source. It might have been Decisive but I’m not sure.
In the book the authors described the problem of physicians leading patient’s questions like with the complaint “my stomach hurts” they ask “does it hurt here?” pointing to where they feel the pain should be located. The patient, intimidated by the professional in front of them, affirms the question without supplying the information that it also hurts elsewhere. This is not yet a problem of vocabulary, but nonetheless important to keep in mind. The more interesting example was of an old man that described his problem as “feeling dizzy”, so physicians tried to treat him for the syndromes that typically occur at higher ages. After some time a physician actually asked him “when do you feel dizzy?”, receiving the answer “I feel dizzy all the time, when I get up, when I stand in the kitchen, when I read my newspaper.” Turns out what this patient described as “being dizzy” was more something along the lines of “feeling confused” and was a symptom of a as-of-yet undiagnosed depression over his late wife’s passing.
The whole episode could have been avoided if the patient knew how to correctly describe his issue—and if the pphysicians were more conscientious in diagnosing a specific issue.
Learning that there a qualia of “being dizzy” and a qualia of “feeling confused” and learning being able to distinguish those two qualia’s isn’t easy, if you don’t have those qualia in the first place.
Words are cheap once you have the qualia.
Most people have fairly little awareness of what goes on inside their own body. Furthermore these days most doctors also lack the ability to perceive that information kinesthetically but focus on various tests and verbal feedback.
Practically it’s also important to think about what information a doctor actually needs. That means who have to know what’s normal and how you deviate from that.
Why not then just get a working knowledge of those languages? I had classical education and so I took latin and greek. I also speak some german as well as a working and halting conversational knowledge of french. When you have that you can understand the latin root from a word like ambulate or return.
A working knowledge of the languages is a much larger project. I’m moderately good at figuring out medical terms, but that doesn’t mean I can do more than guessing at translations of text.
The actual medical knowledge is still requires but if you know the roots of things you can learn a great deal. The medical knowledge will give you meaning these can be quickly researched. In this day and time the ability to know a great deal of something requires only simple searches. I make a list of things to search all the time regular reading a research is Aristotelian.
Could you unpack that last sentence? I can’t make sense of it. Aristotelian?
My procedure for coming up with search terms is to vaguely imagine a boring piece of writing about the subject I’m interested in, and then look for the least common words from it. If that doesn’t work, then loosely mull for words inspired by the results that came up in the unsatisfactory searches.
Aristotelian = of Aristotle. Aristotle believed that regular reading, research, and expansion of the mind on various subjects was necessary to a good life. He wrote a great deal about the good life. I suggest adding that to your reading list.
I just take a subject say, “Scoliosis” and just put that into google and see what comes up. I start with the most popular sites and then look to more personal accounts once I know what is or is not scientific about it. For example, I am working on a novel right now and I needed to know how people performed check fraud. So I put that into google and started to read and eventually found a book by a detective about different cases he had solved. That helped me create a scenario that was very good and real life for the book. If you so choose you can do that regularly on a variety of subjects to learn more about something. The luxury about having a background in classical languages is that you can decode language and derive some meaning from it. Research is about layering. You start at the surface and then go deeper, then deeper and then deeper still. Think about the hierarchy of media:
Social Media (instant)
Newspapers (or daily up to the minute news)
Magazines (or media taking 4-5 days to create)
Content aggregators/Monthly Publications
Books
So for example researching check fraud I might see:
Tweets/posts about it
A newspaper article about a check fraud ring
A Magazine piece about its prevalence in America
A group of these items over a period of time between one month and one year
A book about check fraud rings by an expert
How far you go in the hierarchy depends on how much you want to know or where that information might be located. Also, for more effective searches in the future you may wish to use full sentences (Google is getting good at that) or also learning Boolean search terms.
Attempting to learn medicine vocabulary without understanding the underlying knowledge base is quite hard. Taking a readymade deck of corresponding vocabulary usually leads to attempting to learn something without understanding. That leads to forgotten cards and is ineffective.
Since I don’t have the books around me, I’ll have to write from memory without specific source. It might have been Decisive but I’m not sure.
In the book the authors described the problem of physicians leading patient’s questions like with the complaint “my stomach hurts” they ask “does it hurt here?” pointing to where they feel the pain should be located. The patient, intimidated by the professional in front of them, affirms the question without supplying the information that it also hurts elsewhere. This is not yet a problem of vocabulary, but nonetheless important to keep in mind. The more interesting example was of an old man that described his problem as “feeling dizzy”, so physicians tried to treat him for the syndromes that typically occur at higher ages. After some time a physician actually asked him “when do you feel dizzy?”, receiving the answer “I feel dizzy all the time, when I get up, when I stand in the kitchen, when I read my newspaper.” Turns out what this patient described as “being dizzy” was more something along the lines of “feeling confused” and was a symptom of a as-of-yet undiagnosed depression over his late wife’s passing.
The whole episode could have been avoided if the patient knew how to correctly describe his issue—and if the pphysicians were more conscientious in diagnosing a specific issue.
Learning that there a qualia of “being dizzy” and a qualia of “feeling confused” and learning being able to distinguish those two qualia’s isn’t easy, if you don’t have those qualia in the first place.
Words are cheap once you have the qualia.
Most people have fairly little awareness of what goes on inside their own body. Furthermore these days most doctors also lack the ability to perceive that information kinesthetically but focus on various tests and verbal feedback.
Practically it’s also important to think about what information a doctor actually needs. That means who have to know what’s normal and how you deviate from that.
How about starting with the Greek and Latin roots for medical terms?
Why not then just get a working knowledge of those languages? I had classical education and so I took latin and greek. I also speak some german as well as a working and halting conversational knowledge of french. When you have that you can understand the latin root from a word like ambulate or return.
A working knowledge of the languages is a much larger project. I’m moderately good at figuring out medical terms, but that doesn’t mean I can do more than guessing at translations of text.
The actual medical knowledge is still requires but if you know the roots of things you can learn a great deal. The medical knowledge will give you meaning these can be quickly researched. In this day and time the ability to know a great deal of something requires only simple searches. I make a list of things to search all the time regular reading a research is Aristotelian.
Could you unpack that last sentence? I can’t make sense of it. Aristotelian?
My procedure for coming up with search terms is to vaguely imagine a boring piece of writing about the subject I’m interested in, and then look for the least common words from it. If that doesn’t work, then loosely mull for words inspired by the results that came up in the unsatisfactory searches.
Aristotelian = of Aristotle. Aristotle believed that regular reading, research, and expansion of the mind on various subjects was necessary to a good life. He wrote a great deal about the good life. I suggest adding that to your reading list.
I just take a subject say, “Scoliosis” and just put that into google and see what comes up. I start with the most popular sites and then look to more personal accounts once I know what is or is not scientific about it. For example, I am working on a novel right now and I needed to know how people performed check fraud. So I put that into google and started to read and eventually found a book by a detective about different cases he had solved. That helped me create a scenario that was very good and real life for the book. If you so choose you can do that regularly on a variety of subjects to learn more about something. The luxury about having a background in classical languages is that you can decode language and derive some meaning from it. Research is about layering. You start at the surface and then go deeper, then deeper and then deeper still. Think about the hierarchy of media:
Social Media (instant) Newspapers (or daily up to the minute news) Magazines (or media taking 4-5 days to create) Content aggregators/Monthly Publications Books
So for example researching check fraud I might see:
Tweets/posts about it A newspaper article about a check fraud ring A Magazine piece about its prevalence in America A group of these items over a period of time between one month and one year A book about check fraud rings by an expert
How far you go in the hierarchy depends on how much you want to know or where that information might be located. Also, for more effective searches in the future you may wish to use full sentences (Google is getting good at that) or also learning Boolean search terms.