health information and using "pee", "poop", etc

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Medical professional here. Nothing is wrong with using urine and feces. However, a lot of us have been taught at some point or other that when talking about medical details, assume most people have a 5th grade education about things. You'd be surprised what people don't know and are too embarrassed to ask. It isn't about talking down to anyone , it's just trying to make is pause and think about what words we use vs what words are used in common language. I don't really think "boob" and "veejay" are quite on the same level as "pee" and "poop".

I get that, sort of, although I think adults who honestly don't know the words would probably use the more colorful versions. But I think it would make sense to use BOTH words if necessary to communicate,. especially in written content. It's ironic, isn't it?--that at the same time it has been determined that patients should have instantaneous access to their lab results? (Or that they should be experts at "comparison shopping" medical care and health insurance?)

Gods forbid patients have the results of the tests they're paying for when they're readily available online, or make informed decision about their care providers and insurance options.

Whitecoats are control freaks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm positive Dr. House started all this!

I was reading about these Tufts U athletes hospitalized for muscle tissue breakdown. Article had a link for the medical term and I checked it out. Went to Cleveland Clinic which provided info about causes, symptoms, prognosis, etc. And consistently referred to the color of one's pee among the signs of the condition.

WTH is wrong with saying "urine" or "feces" or "bowel movement"? I haven't noticed the word "boob" in such literature but maybe I need to pay more attention. Is "veejay" going to be next when epxlaining pelvic exams???

I'm a medical professional, former trial attorney. When I went to trial advocacy school I was urged repeatedly to take the vocabulary down several notches - I have a graduate degree in literature and read most of Dickens before I ever went to college.

Most jurors are at a 6-8th grade vocabulary level. That's the average patient searching online for medical information as well. Some of these people have some college or even a degree, but that was years ago and just like kids over the summer between grades, people don't retain everything they learned. They naturally regress to a mean of communication that is mirrored by their daily relationships and interactions in the world.

Lots of people don't know the words urine and feces. There is nothing wrong with doctors and medical websites using 'pee' and 'poo' to ensure that knowledge is transmitted effectively.

Get off your high horse, poster.

The US has an 85% high school graduation rate. Sounds like juries are being selected for a specific reason.

I'm not sure what your point is, poster?

Our jury system works very well and in my experience as a criminal trial attorney, it generally draws a random slice of the community with a cross section of life experience. Beyond that, it's the job of the court and lawyers to utilize the voir dire process to weed out biases in jurors. Some jurors will be highly educated

But as far as average education level - yes, we have an 85% high school graduation rate. How many of those people do you think will ever read another book again in their adult life by choice and not because they were required to do so by further education or by an employment requirement?

I recently listened to the podcast "Sold a Story" and was dismayed to learn about the current state of reading education in American public schools. Suffice to say, it is not a good situation.

Here's some random stats from Literacyinc.com:

15% of the United States population has specific reading disorders.
46% of American adults cannot understand the labels on their pharmaceutical prescriptions.
56% of young people claim they read fewer than 10 books a year.
50% of U.S. adults are unable to read an eighth grade level book.
33% of U.S. high school graduates never read a book after high school.
80% of U.S. families have not purchased a book this year.
50% of books started are never read to completion.
70% of adults have not been in a bookstore in the past five years.
15% of U.S. students are dyslexic.

Less than 25% of the US population has completed a bachelor's degree. Less than 15% have completed any advanced degree from MA to MD, JD, PhD.

People who finished high school and then never picked up another book the rest of their adult life except perhaps the holy book at their house of worship are just not very well read and need to have information presented at a middle school level at best. And no, online resources for medical information is not the appropriate place to be attempting to change this reality; the role of the technical writer is to meet the reader where s/he is at and maximize effective communication of essential information.

My point is that despite the increases in "educational attainment," there has been a decrease in literary proficiency starting in the 1970s. Given that mathematical education has always lagged behind, the average high school graduate in the US has an eight grade reading level and fifth grade mathematics proficiency. Perhaps we could educate the citizens instead of regressing to the mean?

[Anonymous]

I also noticed this - last week I was dealing with a situation with my colon and could not believe that the online source - it was Cleveland Clinic or something reasonably trustworthy - kept using the term poop!

[Anonymous]

It seems like this forum gets questions pretty often with lab results etc. asking "what does this mean?" but then when medical literature is written this way, with words like "pee", it comes off as patronizing to the educated DCUMer. It's hard to straddle that line between "written for a medical professional" and "written for the 100 IQ average person".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm positive Dr. House started all this!

I was reading about these Tufts U athletes hospitalized for muscle tissue breakdown. Article had a link for the medical term and I checked it out. Went to Cleveland Clinic which provided info about causes, symptoms, prognosis, etc. And consistently referred to the color of one's pee among the signs of the condition.

WTH is wrong with saying "urine" or "feces" or "bowel movement"? I haven't noticed the word "boob" in such literature but maybe I need to pay more attention. Is "veejay" going to be next when epxlaining pelvic exams???

I'm a medical professional, former trial attorney. When I went to trial advocacy school I was urged repeatedly to take the vocabulary down several notches - I have a graduate degree in literature and read most of Dickens before I ever went to college.

Most jurors are at a 6-8th grade vocabulary level. That's the average patient searching online for medical information as well. Some of these people have some college or even a degree, but that was years ago and just like kids over the summer between grades, people don't retain everything they learned. They naturally regress to a mean of communication that is mirrored by their daily relationships and interactions in the world.

Lots of people don't know the words urine and feces. There is nothing wrong with doctors and medical websites using 'pee' and 'poo' to ensure that knowledge is transmitted effectively.

Get off your high horse, poster.

The US has an 85% high school graduation rate. Sounds like juries are being selected for a specific reason.

I'm not sure what your point is, poster?

Our jury system works very well and in my experience as a criminal trial attorney, it generally draws a random slice of the community with a cross section of life experience. Beyond that, it's the job of the court and lawyers to utilize the voir dire process to weed out biases in jurors. Some jurors will be highly educated

But as far as average education level - yes, we have an 85% high school graduation rate. How many of those people do you think will ever read another book again in their adult life by choice and not because they were required to do so by further education or by an employment requirement?

I recently listened to the podcast "Sold a Story" and was dismayed to learn about the current state of reading education in American public schools. Suffice to say, it is not a good situation.

Here's some random stats from Literacyinc.com:

15% of the United States population has specific reading disorders.
46% of American adults cannot understand the labels on their pharmaceutical prescriptions.
56% of young people claim they read fewer than 10 books a year.
50% of U.S. adults are unable to read an eighth grade level book.
33% of U.S. high school graduates never read a book after high school.
80% of U.S. families have not purchased a book this year.
50% of books started are never read to completion.
70% of adults have not been in a bookstore in the past five years.
15% of U.S. students are dyslexic.

Less than 25% of the US population has completed a bachelor's degree. Less than 15% have completed any advanced degree from MA to MD, JD, PhD.

People who finished high school and then never picked up another book the rest of their adult life except perhaps the holy book at their house of worship are just not very well read and need to have information presented at a middle school level at best. And no, online resources for medical information is not the appropriate place to be attempting to change this reality; the role of the technical writer is to meet the reader where s/he is at and maximize effective communication of essential information.

My point is that despite the increases in "educational attainment," there has been a decrease in literary proficiency starting in the 1970s. Given that mathematical education has always lagged behind, the average high school graduate in the US has an eight grade reading level and fifth grade mathematics proficiency. Perhaps we could educate the citizens instead of regressing to the mean?

By all means, let’s address the shortcomings in public education in meaningful ways and raise the literacy and critical thinking skills of our citizenry - I’m all for that.

But there are powers that be who are very much against that objective- certain politicians and corporate interests who feel exactly the same as the one who let slip the truth that they ‘love the poorly educated.’ They want the people to be marks.

I digress.

The point is that the place for that raising of average educational attainment is not the Cleveland Clinic or other medical informational website where they make the choice to use basic language because that best meets the needs of the widest possible audience to their page and they aren’t too worried about the highly educated some of whom will get bent out of shape over the use of words like poo and pee.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I used to work as a medical editor and this was an ongoing controversy at my work. There seems like there should be a word in between pooping and evacuation of the bowel but we never settled on it.

What about defecating?

Nobody likes that. The physicians wanted "passing stool." I guess that is the med school approved language.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It seems like this forum gets questions pretty often with lab results etc. asking "what does this mean?" but then when medical literature is written this way, with words like "pee", it comes off as patronizing to the educated DCUMer. It's hard to straddle that line between "written for a medical professional" and "written for the 100 IQ average person".

That's not what they are typically asking. The subtext is usually, tell me why this test result doesn't mean what I think it means based on my five second Google search.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You should read the public information coming out from the UK, Australia and NZ. They use words like poo, tummy and bottom.

https://service-manual.nhs.uk/content/a-to-z-of-nhs-health-writing

Although the doctor above talks about many patients having a 5th grade reading level, for the rest of us, this kind of infantile language is jarring.

How is pee and poop jarring in a online article that your average person is looking up for the causes of a condition?

Because I read articles about my condition in medical journal that even my PCP doesn't get around to reading, so I don't enjoy being spoken to as if I am 10 or 11 years old.

How distressing for you that the articles designed for the masses assaulted your eyes this way. I hope you have the means to recover.

[Anonymous]

I work in GI. A frequent interaction: “How often do you have a bowel movement?” (No answer) “How often do you have a bowel movement?” (No answer) “How often do you poop?” (Answer). I always start with bowel movement and always go to poop on 3rd try.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work in GI. A frequent interaction: “How often do you have a bowel movement?” (No answer) “How often do you have a bowel movement?” (No answer) “How often do you poop?” (Answer). I always start with bowel movement and always go to poop on 3rd try.

Honestly, as long as the medical professionals are getting the information they need, I think people (not you, PP!) need to be less hung up on the specific word choice.

My mother was baffling one of her doctors for ages because she insisted on saying she "Had to get up at night" [lengthy explanation of further word choices omitted here, but her doctor's assumption was reasonable], and her doctor thought she was getting up to put on more ointment. But no, she was getting up to urinate. Only she couldn't bring herself to say urinate or pee.

People in the Pets forum are always talking about their pets "going to the bathroom" or "doing their business." The pets are doing neither.

Then there are the people who pride themselves on using the correct word, only they're saying "vagina" when they mean "vulva"

[Anonymous]

I'd guess that there is nobody who doesn't know what pee and poop mean, so those seem to be the terms that make the most sense for all audiences, including children.