Medical records for patients contain a lot of specialized terms and abbreviations. Surprisingly, only a few people complain about the documents that track their health, even though it’s often difficult to determine the severity of their condition or the proposed treatment. While at the doctor’s, people have the opportunity to ask for clarification, but sometimes questions don’t come to mind, or the answers are forgotten. For issues as vital as health, a person should be able to access and explore his information in plain language whenever it suits him.
Technical terms and abbreviations appear in such documents, even those intended for a patient, when ordinary English equivalents exist: otitis ‘ear infection’, anorexia ’eating disorder’, phobia ‘fear’, amnesia ‘memory loss’, pyrexia ’fever’. A patient can easily make a mistake when the prescription reads prn, sl, or ac. Confusion can also arise from diagnoses. One concerned patient returned to the hospital to ask about “elevated RR” that she seemed to be suffering from, along hypertension – because her patient history didn’t make clear that both terms refer to high blood pressure.