The Understanding of modern Medicine.

Essay by bawd420University, Bachelor'sA+, March 2004

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The Understanding of modern Medicine

Perri Klass MD is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center, and Medical Director of the Reach Out and Read National Center. Her pediatric subspecialty is Pediatric Infectious Diseases, and she is particularly interested in travel medicine. Dr. Klass has a pediatric primary care practice at Dorchester House, a neighborhood health center in Boston. Through her role at Reach Out and Read she has trained pediatricians around the country to counsel parents about the importance of reading aloud with young children, and how to integrate books and literacy into routine pediatric care.

In the essay "Learning The Language" by Perri Klass, she gives an example of an inner ring that brings people together. According to Klass, doctors and nurses have a special language that they use and only they understand. This language contributes to a sense of closeness and professional spirit among people who are under a great deal of stress.

This special communication between the doctors also separates the patients from the doctors. By talking over the patient's head, it reduces some of the patient's emotional impact. It also protects the doctors from becoming emotionally attached to the patients by referring to them as tests instead of by their names.

To understand what it really means, obviously we must know what DNA is, what a molecule is, what a gene is, what an insertion sequence is, what a chromosome is, and what a chromosomal location is. Technical fields define one technical word in terms of other technical words, and you can only understand such definitions by learning enough about the content. But, it is not at all to be taken as a substitute for technical definitions. The real meanings, the technical definitions, have to be learned...