I went to visit a relative in the hospital yesterday, and the experience reminded me of how challenging my future job is going to be. My aunt had had her gallbladder removed, and it was really interesting to listen to my uncle explain to my mom and cousin what had happened in the past couple of weeks. When we came home, it was even more interesting to listen to my mother explain to my stepfather her interpretation of what she had heard.

Most of my relatives didn’t go to college; many didn’t finish high school. Their understanding of medicine and science is at best incomplete and and at worst, based on superstition or folk wisdom. Even when you ignore the language barrier for people like my relatives (older, ethnic minorities, immigrants), there is an additional communication challenge to overcome. How do medical professionals, particularly physicians, effectively communicate the complexities of a patient’s illness and treatment if that patient is not science literate? This question obviously doesn’t only apply to older, ethnic immigrants but to anyone who doesn’t have a basic grasp of biology. How do I even know how effective I am in expressing myself if they just blindly nod in good faith to whatever I’m saying? My uncle himself confessed that he didn’t really know what the doctor had said to him, since he couldn’t understand the medical jargon. (And he is one of the most educated people in our family.) Luckily, my cousin, his daughter, is training to be a physician and was able to speak to her mother’s doctor and get the story. Unfortunately, we don’t all have a doctor in the family, and having a doctor who speaks the same language isn’t always enough. My father’s doctors were all Vietnamese (and thus theoretically capable of communicating with our family), but my mother still never really understood what had happened to her husband. And I can’t help but wonder if this is really the rule rather than the exception, if, most of the time, the people we serve don’t really know what we’re doing to them or why. I suppose a lot of people don’t really need to know, would rather not know, in much depth what is really going on in their bodies, but then again, how much can we afford to lose in translation?