Can doctors write in clear English?
The Guardian reports:
Hospital doctors are being told to write letters directly to patients, and in plain English, in a move the profession’s leaders hope will sweep away the use of baffling medical terminology.
The initiative by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges aims to make medics use clear language to describe medical conditions instead of Latin words, acronyms and complex jargon.
All very well, but scientific language (jargon, if you like) is frequently used for the sake of greater accuracy. Plain English is seldom as plain as its adherents think it is. It seems to me that there is just as much scope for misinterpreting a letter written in plain English about a complex medical condition as there is in respect of a more scientific approach.
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