Aisha legged it out of the consultation room. That’s how she described it to me. The doctor had just prescribed her Viagra, and nobody had explained why.
Aisha has PH-ILD, a serious condition where the vessels in the lungs become narrowed, making breathing increasingly difficult. The treatment her doctor recommended was sildenafil. The drug dilates those vessels, opening them up so oxygen to help her breathing.
But sildenafil, sold over the counter under the name Viagra, meant one thing for Aisha and that was at odds with her values. So, when the doctor left the room saying a nurse would soon come to check her blood pressure and give her the pill, Aisha waited until the door closed and ran out of the hospital.
The word jargon comes from old French terms meaning “bird chatter” or “meaningless warbling.” Jargon at its worst is when language stops communicating and starts obscuring.
A recent story in the Financial Times captured this perfectly. When the toilet on Artemis II stopped working after take-off, astronaut Christina Koch fixed it herself. “That makes me the space plumber,” she said. I love that language.
However, her Nasa colleagues back on earth seemed to be on a different planet. One of them told the crew that although the toilet was working, it would be best to wait a bit “before donating fluid”.
I mean come on.
Good jargon exists because it is precise, technical language that serves a real purpose when used with the right people at the right time. NASA engineers need shorthand and so do clinicians. A hospital without shared clinical language would quickly lead to very bad outcomes but jargon can alienate the people we are trying to help.
What saved Aisha was a phone call.
Her doctor rang from Sheffield to find out where she’d gone. She told him she couldn’t take Viagra, it went against her beliefs. He didn’t rush her and just listened while she cried. Then he explained in careful, plain words not what the drug was known for, but what it would do for her breathing and her life.
Every word arrives inside a person’s life, their history, their beliefs, their fears. “Sildenafil” is neutral. “Viagra” is not. Not for everyone.
Aisha came back the next day. She took the tablet. That was 2017. She still takes it twice a day and it has never affected her in the way she feared.
But not every patient comes back.
