Linguistically Challenged Doctors

This post was meant to be a comment to my friend Lalit's post called 'Can I heal you in English?'. I wrote so much that I finally decided to start and post it on my own blog. Check out his blog entry first then read on.

http://lalitnarayan.blogspot.com/2005/03/can-i-heal-you-in-english.html

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Hey Lalit !

I'm one of those linguistically challenged doctors you talk about, who also incidenally believes in one world one language. 'How atrocious, what about all the loss of cultural diversity' you might say. I have seen some of my classmates pick up languages relatively fast and put them to use in the hospital. One of them from Andhra, speaks to a Keralite patient in Malayalam, but put a Telugu patient in front of him and see the room light up for both of them, you know what I mean. The situation is not about picking up a language. How many languages would a Bangalorean doc need to know to take care of about 90% of his patients ? Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Telugu and English.

Wow!

The situation is neither about picking up a language or 5-7 languages if we insist we do linguistic justice to every patient who walks in, nor is it about communication which consists of the triad of listening, speaking and understanding. Both these though extremely tough are child’s play when it comes to the Big Mama of all healing... 'Establishing a Rapport'. It is one of the most gratifying aspects for a doctor and the main contributor to his job satisfaction. As far as the patient goes, a lot of whether you are a 'good' doctor or a 'bad' doctor depends on whether you were able to build a good rapport, no body checks your mortality rate or the number of publications you have! It boils down to ... ‘Can you light up the room’ which you might extrapolate to 'In just how many languages can you light up the room!'

We can exalt and promote regional languages and put the responsibility of good communication in multiple languages on the doctor. But one of the main reasons we got this far is because we started off in an English medium school. There is no way I could have got through the St. John’s interview in Kannada. I wouldn’t even get past the application form! This is why keeping English out of government schools is equivalent to breaking a kid’s leg before she’s learnt to walk! The vernacular boys with their vested interests continue to blow their vernacular horn, but we don’t see them providing a solution for the high rate of unemployment among the non English speaking youth. Promote regional languages by all means but they shouldn't block English from being taught in the schools. Which brings me back to ‘one world one language’. Communicating in one language, as it is, is hard enough. Getting medical students to pick up languages in a systematic method in college is important, but wouldn't it be so simple if we all just spoke 'binary'.

Despite these different sides of the same coin, our heart is in the right place.... :)
Nice to see that you're keeping the white mice running along in your head, active!

Blog on brother!!

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Max Planck: 'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.