Supporting Patients

Is paraphrasing medical language to everyday language effective?

Abstract

In hospital, patients are often spoken in a different language by providers. Laypeople including patients use everyday language for thinking, while providers use medical language for the description of disease. Since we (patients) are not familiar with the medical language, we have insufficient understanding of medical information from it. This paper focuses on medical language, and attempts to clarify the effects of the description of medical information by providers who would understand the relevance theory, developed by Sperber and Wilson.