• Medical Education
• Medical Journalism

Medical school, and our subsequent training, doesn't prepare us for everything. In fact, I'm increasingly thinking that it mostly prepares us for dealing with feeling unprepared. Recently, via the blog and on Twitter, we were discussing the differences between medical meanings and the lay use of the same language. I've learned to be wary when lay folk use a word for which I have a fairly precise medical understanding. Of course, this does mean that I frequently sound like a twit when I hear myself asking questions like ‘But what do you mean by pain?’ There were a few descriptions that I thought, before medical school, were medical, and then afterwards I decided that they might not be. A couple spring to mind reading this issue.

To my shame, I imagined for some years …