thinking, or counseling is called a “cognitive service.” Even general medicine is a specialty now.
The big word in the medical business these days is “wellness,” as in “Patient failed to fulfill his wellness potential,” a notation made by a doctor on the hospital chart of a patient who had died. The University of California, Berkeley Wellness Letter defines wellness as “optimum physical and mental health. A positive, on-going approach to a robust lifestyle. A preventative way of living that reduces—sometimes eliminates—the need for remedies.”
Doublespeak can and is used to avoid those harsh realities the medical profession prefers not to acknowledge. At Creedmore Psychiatric Center in New York, a mental patient in a straitjacket died of “inappropriate physical abuse,” said Irene Platt, acting chair of the New York State Commission on Quality of Care for the Mentally Disabled. Don’t you wonder what might constitute appropriate physical abuse?
Medical doublespeak can have political and moral implications, as well as life-and-death consequences. In his 1987 book, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, Randy Shilts discusses AIDSpeak, “a new language forged by public health officials, anxious gay politicians, and the burgeoning ranks of ‘AIDS activists.’ ” Shilts points out that AIDSpeak was designed to be “politically facile and psychologically reassuring.” AIDSpeak goes to great lengths never to offend the moral or political sensibilities of the public, politicians, and members of the gay community. AIDSpeak never refers to AIDS sufferers as victims. They’re called “People With AIDS,” or “PWAs.” That unpleasant word, “promiscuous,” becomes in AIDSpeak “sexually active,” because gay politicians decided that the word “promiscuous” was “judgmental” and AIDSpeak could never be judgmental. The most used phrase in AIDSpeak is “bodily fluids,” an expression that avoids troublesome words like “semen.”
But the most pernicious word in AIDSpeak, according to Shilts, is the term “exposed.” Persons who had the HTLV-III antibodies were told they had been “exposed” to the virus, and the term soon became beloved by health workers around the country because it avoided so many problems. Yet this word is doublespeak of the most serious kind, because people who have the antibodies to a virus have been infected by it. They haven’t simply been exposed. As Dr. Bruce Voeller, a San Diego research microbiologist, said, “When people say ‘expose,’ I get the feeling that they think the virus floats around the room, like the scent of gardenias, and somehow they get exposed. That’s not how it works. If you’ve got an antibody, that virus has been in your blood.” AIDSpeak is the doublespeak of life and death.
In the doublespeak of medicine, doctors addicted to drugs are “impaired physicians.” At least that’s what the American Medical Association says. The doctor who charged Blue Shield for services that were either medically unnecessary or were never performed had “inappropriately received” $750,000. Others might call it theft. Patients don’t experience pain anymore, just “discomfort.” But then, as noted earlier, people don’t die in hospitals anymore, there’s just “negative patient care outcome,” a “terminal episode,” or “terminal living.” In the emergency room, “systems fail.” And when the surgeon at a Philadelphia hospital perforated the patient’s colon during an examination resulting in complications which caused the patient’s death the hospital attributed death to a “diagnostic misadventure of a high magnitude.” Such is the doublespeak of death in the medical world.
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