Revising The Medical Vocabulary

    It can be difficult to communicate with your doctor and understand what they is saying. The difficulty for us may increase if the CMA decides to follow the AMA and provide new linguistic guidelines to govern the discourse between the patient and the practitioner.  It is not the case that the doctors are, for example, renaming all those bones. The concern is about 'normal' words, like the pronoun I used in the first sentence. 

   When I read about this undertaking, I wasn't sure it was true since there seem to be a few other things the members of the AMA should be concerned about. It is true, however, and the chart above is taken from the report you should read if you are thinking about opting for surgery at the Mayo or Cleveland Clinics. It is more difficult to read than a typical medical chart, but if you want to bone up on the new lingo, read this: Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts. 

   This is good news, I suppose, in that it is great to see that the members of the AMA have finally become concerned about the issue of "Health Equity."

Sources:
  You have been provided with the primary document, so you can read it yourself and decide where you stand. There have been some negative reactions, with which I agree. Here is one example: "The Medical Establishment Embraces Leftist Language: New Guidelines Urge Doctors to Talk Like Social-Justice Ideologues. Whether Patients Understand Them is Beside the Point," Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, Nov. 13, 2021.

The Bonus:
   Given that most members of the AMA are hardly likely to lean left, probably little attention will be paid to this document. And, if a doctor should slip and make the egregious error of telling a patient they were "vulnerable" or at "high risk", they should be forgiven until we all have had time to adjust to the new vocabularies.
  Such language demands may drift north and perhaps the CMA is already drafting new word choices in both languages.  There may be some resistance within the ranks of the OMA. You perhaps recall that the members did not take kindly to the diktat that required the announcement about "Land Acknowledgement" before meetings. It appears that sometimes good, progressive intentions tend to be counterproductive and increase resentment rather than improve efforts at reconciliation.
  The source for that: "OMA Apologizes for Offending Indigenous Peoples. The Ontario Medical Association is in Damage-control Mode After its Governing Council Voted Against a Motion to Open Meetings With an Increasingly Cited Acknowledgement That They Were Being Held on Traditional Lands of Indigenous Peoples," Theresa Boyle, Toronto Star, May1, 2018.