The Secret Language of Doctors

Overview

Most people have visited a doctor's office or emergency room in their lifetime to gain clarity about an ailment or check in after a procedure. While doctors strive to ensure their patients understand their diagnoses, rarely do those outside the medical community understand the words and phrases we hear practitioners yell across a hospital hallway or murmur to a colleague behind office doors. Doctors and nurses use a kind of secret language, comprised of words unlikely to be found in a medical textbook or heard on television. In The Secret Language of Doctors, Dr. Brian Goldman decodes those code words for the average patient. What does it mean when a patient has the symptoms of "incarceritis"? What are "blocking" and "turfing"? And why do you never want to be diagnosed with a "horrendoma"? Dr. Goldman reveals the meaning behind the colorful and secret expressions doctors use to describe difficult patients, situations, and medical conditions—including those they don't want you to know. Gain profound insight into what doctors really think about patients in this funny and biting examination of modern medical culture.

Author Biography

Dr. Brian Goldman is an emergency physician at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital and the host of CBC Radio's award-winning program White Coat, Black Art. He is the author of the acclaimed book The Night Shift and his TEDx talk about medical errors, which has been viewed on the Internet almost one million times, has cemented his reputation as one of his generation's keenest observers of the culture of modern medicine. He lives in Toronto.

Media

Press Releases

 

The Secret Language of Doctors: Cracking the Code of Hospital Culture

By Dr. Brian Goldman

Contact: Bill Ames, Triumph Books, 312-676-4256, b.ames@triumphbooks.com

 

“Yellow submarine,” “Hollywood Code” and “beemer” are not everyday terms that patients hear in a doctor’s office or the emergency room. Little did we know, medical professionals have their own secret medical jargon that they use to describe difficult patients and medical conditions. However, you won’t find these words in an anatomy textbook.

 

For the first time ever, these secret terms and phrases are explained to patients in The Secret Language of Doctors: Cracking the Code of Hospital Culture (Triumph Books, April 2015) by Dr. Brian Goldman. Dr. Goldman is an emergency physician at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital and has spent years learning and collecting terms that he and his colleagues use on a daily basis. Flip through the pages to discover:

 

• Chapters take readers to different parts of the hospital, including the emergency room, the labor and delivery floor, the intensive care unit, etc. to see how the doctors communicate with each other.
• A look at Dr. Stephen Bergman, the psychiatrist and author of House of God, who was the first physician to introduce medical lingo to millions of readers.
• Stories of doctors and medical professionals who battle professional obstacles as they try to save patients.
• Why if Dr. Goldman was in charge, he would not ban slang terms, but would provide education needed to care for undesirable patients.

The Secret Language of Doctors: Cracking the Code of Hospital Culture is an enlightening guide to the words that physicians only say to each other behind closed doors. Dr. Goldman not only defines these terms for readers, he also touches on medical ethics and medical professionalism in today’s hospital culture… an issue that has become controversial in the 21^st century.

 

About the Author:

Dr. Brian Goldman is an emergency physician at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital and the host of CBC Radio's award-winning program White Coat, Black Art. He is the author of the acclaimed book The Night Shift and his TEDx talk about medical errors, which has been viewed on the Internet almost one million times, has cemented his reputation as one of his generation's keenest observers of the culture of modern medicine. He lives in Toronto.

 

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