What role do the nuances of language play in determining your medical condition and treatment? McMaster University researcher Carol DeMatteo has discovered that children whose head injuries were described as concussions spent fewer days in hospital and returned to school sooner than those with similar injuries who were given other, often more technical, diagnoses.
Her conclusion: The everydayness of the word "concussion" persuades parents and even practitioners to underestimate the severity of the trauma. The use of abstruse medical jargon - mild traumatic brain injury, as concussion is known to insiders - is both more accurate and more likely to lead to appropriate treatment.
If we learn to stop throwing around a loose term like concussion, as Prof. DeMatteo suggests, it will be consistent with a trend that has seen an increasing medicalization of the language used to describe our state of physical and mental health.
When conditions are described in medicalese, they are taken more seriously. With concussions, that should turn out to be beneficial, but in the modern medical marketplace, the reliance on technical terminology can cut both ways.
The quiet humiliation of impotence has given way to the highly treatable - and highly profitable - erectile dysfunction disorder. No longer is a limp organ a natural sign of aging's sad inevitability but rather a curable disorder awaiting its drug-plan-approved remedy. In its wake, male-pattern baldness became the semi-manageable androgenic alopecia, which critics regard as the drug companies' way of elevating ordinary life into a fearsome disease that must be fought off with pharmaceuticals.
Most observers of the changes in medical treatment would see it as a good thing that phrase such as shell-shock has been refined and broadened into the much more professionalized post-traumatic stress disorder - at least it allows distressed war veterans to be treated less shabbily.
Meanwhile, TV ads in the United States seem to announce the creation of new diseases and treatments on an almost daily basis - for restless leg syndrome, social anxiety disorder, irritable bowel syndrome and many more problems you didn't realize affected you until they got a fancy name, their own TV spot and a pharmaceutical solution supplied by a company that just may have a hand in this awareness campaign.
The increased medicalization of language may mark a cultural shift, an enhanced us-and-them show of respect for scientific expertise. Clearly it can also be a marketing department's rebranding effort that couples our physical and psychological insecurities with our susceptibility to arcane doctor-speak. But taking medicalese more seriously also has its advantages, according to McGill researcher Meredith Young.
"Once you use a fancy medical term to label a condition, people feel more valid about their conditions or are more likely to seek medical help."
Yes, this may lead to an expensive waste of resources with some of the made-for-TV syndromes. But when it comes to traumatic brain injury, fancy terminology turns out to be a more effective attention-getter than an understandable but misunderstood everyday word.
"The change of language to something that sounds more serious will encourage better management of the injury," says Prof. Young. "People will give it more credence and more care."
John Allemang is a Globe and Mail feature writer.