Words of battle are embedded deeply in our discourse about illness. In 1971, President Richard Nixon famously declared a “war on cancer.” In the face of a life-threatening diagnosis, people often resolve to be fighters, to do everything they can to avoid losing their battle.
For Dr. Sunita Puri, this language is familiar. But she says that in her experience working with patients, these words can obscure the reality of each person’s experience of disease.
Dr. Puri, the director of the hospice and palliative medicine fellowship at the University of Massachusetts and author of the memoir “That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour,” joined LAist’s public affairs show AirTalk, which airs on 89.3 FM, to discuss how language can affect how we understand our bodies and their limitations.
Vague words for major decisions
Dr. Puri says that these combative phrases are not very meaningful in a medical sense. Doctors don’t always start a larger discussion about what patients mean when they use these words, or what they are fighting for. In the absence of these conversations, these abstract words still end up serving as proxies for major medical decisions.
“When I was in my residency, if a patient told me that they were a fighter, then my assumption was that they would want to go through any and all treatments, no matter what the cost to their dignity and their suffering and their quality of life,” she says.
This assumption can mean other important conversations — like about the full range of options for care, or about what they want their life to look like — can fall to the wayside.
Words like these also create a dichotomy…
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