Medical communication is an essential field of communication that is related to a variety of challenges. Medicine is a highly complex field with many specific concepts that are not easily understood by outsiders. At the same time, precision is massively important.
Medical documents and medical communication can be important in different contexts. They might matter to patients and their families, as they offer instructions to follow or data about the patient’s conditions. It can matter on a legislative level, as medical documents can provide important information to inform the decisions of policy-makers on a local and an institutional level and even for national organizations.
It can also be important for decision-making processes in topics of health, healthcare, and policy, as this can involve related factors but not necessarily specialists in the field of medicine. It’s necessary to communicate information without losing its meaning or value. You can use medical software translation to help the process of adapting the text.
Major Challenges in Medical Communication
There are many different challenges in medical communication when it is addressed towards the general public or a non-specialist audience. Let’s examine the central issues.
Reliance on Specific Jargon
Medicine is a field that often uses specific jargon words and concepts that do not have equivalents. A part of this jargon refers to specific diseases or conditions, to medications and chemical components, to processes and procedures. Many of these do not have other words to describe the same thing, meaning that for precision’s sake, not all jargon is avoidable.
Need for Precision
Medical communication has a high need for precision. It is not the same thing to describe one part of the body or another and sometimes the difference can have a huge impact on practice. Medical documents need to maintain a high level of precision if the communication is to take place adequately.
High Stakes
In many cases, there are high stakes in medical communication. This means that special care needs to be taken to guarantee that people are on the same page and that the document in question reflects exactly what it needs to. Matters of procedures, recommendations, dosages, and so on should be reflected as accurately as possible, as the lives and health of many people might be related to the success of some of the documents.
Context Matters
In medical communication, the professionals in the field receive years of training, which enable them to better understand the professional language of the area and to use it to communicate. This can make it so that doctors and other professionals writing the papers are immersed in their own context and might not always be clear about how to communicate the same ideas to people outside of the field.
Practical Tips
There are different strategies and solutions for simplifying medical writing. Here are a few basic ideas that can be used to maintain precision and make communication easier.
Cut the Jargon
The first step is to reduce the amount of jargon you need to use. You might have to keep some words because of their importance, but always try to reduce the amount of technical terms. If you have only two or three words for the audience to remember, it is easier to do so than a text that is full of jargon. You can also provide definitions for the words that will be repeated a lot to give a point of reference.
Consider also the audience. A text written for members of the public might need to cut down the jargon more than a text written for someone who is more familiar with the medical context.
Use Shorter Sentences
Another way to make texts better is to shorten them. Use short sentences and small paragraphs. This forces you to use only one idea for each paragraph and even for each sentence. It helps with understanding and also allows you to structure your information in a better way.
Try to keep the text brief and focus on what is important, but don’t be afraid to extend the explanation when needed. Also, use bullet points, bolding, and other tools to structure your text. It aids understanding. Consider also that you need to do a medical localization if translating or adapting.
Repeat and Rephrase
Each document has a few central points. When you have them identified, repeat them a couple of times in different ways. Draw attention to these points by using bullet points, bolding, or by placing them in the text in a more effective way.
Use rephrasing to emphasize your main ideas without boring the audience. When you can change the words around a few times, you can make your point better and help people understand what you mean. If you use jargon at one point of the text, repeat it without jargon.
Examples
How does this look in practice? Let’s take a look at the ways in which we can carry out the process of medical text translation.
“Medication X is an antipyretic, an analgesic, and an antihistamine”
We can rephrase this to say that Medication X has an effect on fever, serves as a painkiller, and aids with allergy symptoms. We can list the allergy symptom as well for maximum clarity. In the text, we can have both the word “antipyretic” and the rephrasing of “it helps with fever” to connect them.
If the word analgesic will be used a lot in the text, then we might define it explicitly: analgesic (painkiller). This helps us use the word in the future without confusion.
Another example of clarity can involve precision. If we say that a medication needs to be taken in the morning and in the evening, we can also add that there need to be 12 hours between doses. We can also specify that the medication should not be taken with something else and that it is better to take it before or after eating. Clarity can help us minimize misunderstandings by giving details and repeating the important ideas several times. We can also use conventional language: the audience has likely read other instructions for medication and are more familiar with specific ways of speaking.
Conclusion
Medical communication is a complicated field. It requires precision because there are very high stakes people need to understand how to take their medication or what has been found through research to adopt the right policies. Medical writers need to become adept at taking complex concepts and adapting them for a general audience, so that even people who have no medical background can understand the basics of the text.
This can be done by avoiding and simplfying jargon. You can define the keywords that you need to keep and avoid using other technical concepts. Use short phrases and short paragraphs, as well as bullet points, bolding, or italics. You can also repeat the key ideas as you rephrase them, by putting them in a different way, it’s more likely that your audience will understand them better. Remember that most of your readers will not have a medical background and might understand some terms differently.
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