In a recent blog post for MarketWatch, Kristen Gerencher gets to the heart of how patients feel as they struggle to communicate in a foreign language when hospitalized or seeing doctors:

“It can be hard enough to talk your way through a medical crisis with doctors and other health-care workers in your native tongue. Chances are you’re not feeling well, you’re scared for your health and you’ve entered a sterile and expensive world you don’t want to be in, all of which make it challenging to hold up your end of a high-stakes conversation. Now imagine the added layer of thinking and wanting to communicate in a language other than English…

Even in best-case scenarios where everyone is fluent and physicians take their time and speak in plain English as opposed to medical-ese, patients are often too polite to ask for clarification if they become overwhelmed by strange-sounding details. But for many people in the U.S., English isn’t the language of choice in such circumstances and only adds to their burden in their moment of need.”

(Extract from “The costly toll of language problems in health care” by Kristen Gerencher, Health Matters blog, November 5, 2009)

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Betty Carlson