{"id":45555,"date":"2014-10-09T17:00:57","date_gmt":"2014-10-09T21:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/?post_type=voices&#038;p=45555"},"modified":"2014-10-09T17:00:57","modified_gmt":"2014-10-09T21:00:57","slug":"why-bad-doctors-are-like-bad-writers-the-curse-of-knowledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/2014\/10\/09\/why-bad-doctors-are-like-bad-writers-the-curse-of-knowledge\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Bad Doctors Are Like Bad Writers: The Curse Of Knowledge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and best-selling author, has\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/articles\/the-cause-of-bad-writing-1411660188\">a wonderful essay in the\u00a0<\/a><em><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/articles\/the-cause-of-bad-writing-1411660188\">Wall Street Journal<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>about why smart people are so often bad writers. Although the essay doesn\u2019t touch on the subject of doctor-patient communication, every single word applies to doctors and the way they communicate (or fail to communicate) with their patients.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s the core of Pinker\u2019s argument. Read\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/articles\/the-cause-of-bad-writing-1411660188\">the rest of it<\/a>. And if you\u2019re a doctor and you don\u2019t see how this is relevant to how you communicate with your patients then you need to think again.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon\u2019s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The kind of stupidity I have in mind has nothing to do with ignorance or low IQ; in fact, it\u2019s often the brightest and best informed who suffer the most from it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Pinker goes on to describe a professor giving a lecture on a recent breakthrough in his field to a large general audience. &#8220;He launched into a jargon-packed technical presentation that was geared to his fellow molecular biologists, and it was immediately apparent to everyone in the room that none of them understood a word and he was wasting their time. Apparent to everyone, that is, except the eminent biologist&#8230;\u00a0Call it the Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>From the archives of the\u00a0<em>New England Journal of Medicine<\/em>, here are two more worthwhile perspectives about doctors abusing language:<\/p>\n<p>In 1975 Michael Crichton, the best-selling novelist and MD,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nejm.org\/doi\/full\/10.1056\/NEJM197512112932413\">neatly dissected the various forms of language abuse<\/a>\u00a0he found in, of all places,\u00a0<em>NEJM<\/em>\u00a0itself.<\/p>\n<p>In 1979\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nejm.org\/doi\/full\/10.1056\/NEJM197904263001710#t=article\">Nicholas Christy wrote about Medspeak<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>What do you think?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Larry Husten applies Steven Pinker&#8217;s ideas about the difficulties of writing to the field of medicine by looking at what makes it difficult for doctors to communicate with their patients.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[610,2238],"class_list":["post-45555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-communication","tag-patient-communication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/cardioexchange\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}