It has been just about a week since I returned from Marseille to Boston. Although the altitude change is welcome, the excitement of the conference is still keeping me awake at night. One such topic is the power and impact of our medical language. We heard a powerful story about the impact of a casual word thrown into a patient’s chart and how that created an anchoring bias that ultimately cost a child’s life — unnecessarily. That story was profound, but I’ll focus on this one aspect of it now. What struck me is my own transformation over the past year. As I’ve really become immersed in the world of medicine — because intern year is nothing if not an “immersion” experience– the language I think in has fundamentally changed. Most of my day is spent either talking about patients to other providers in Medicalese or documenting in the same… Continue reading