PLoS ONE @ Two

In a recent PLoS ONE paper, The Role of Medical Language in Changing Public Perceptions of Illness, Meredith E. Young and her colleagues investigated the effects of disease label on perceived seriousness. Two general categories of label were used: “medicalese” (the technical term for the disease used in the medical community) and the lay language. The researchers based their assessments on a survey of 52 McMaster University undergraduate students.

The researchers also considered the effects of the point in time at which the medicalese label was introduced, separating the diseases into two categories of recently medicalized disorders and established medical disorders based on data from Lexis Nexis. The results of this investigation demonstrate a significant difference in perception depending on the label attributed to the disorder.

This research defines inter-disciplinary. It touches upon the fields of medicine, linguistics, statistics, and even a subset of philosophy. That subset being epistemology — the theory of knowledge. Epistemology recognizes that language (including names for medical disorders) affects what we perceive to be true, what we believe, and what we know. This paper quantifies that epistemic phenomenon, and helps answer the question: how do different labels affect our perception of the same thing?

Nathan