How would most people feel about being told they have male pattern baldness, chronic heartburn, or chronic fatigue syndrome? Would it be worse to learn that they suffer from androgenic alopecia, gastroesophageal reflux disease, or myalgic encephalopathy. Being bald, having indigestion, or feeling rundown may be no picnic, but it sounds a lot better than the second list of ailments even though they represent the same conditions. A new study from researchers at McMaster University finds that whether common language or medical terminology is used to label a disease can influence how serious people think the condition is.

 

The study, published in the open source journal PLOS One, was designed to investigate the impact of medical terminology on perceptions of disease. It speaks to a heated debate within current medical literature over the so-called “medicalization” of syndromes and disorders on the fringes of the classic definition of disease. “A lot of people have become critical of what is sometimes called ‘disease-mongering’—or defining more and more conditions as diseases when they were previously just in the range of normal health, and a change in language certainly seems to accompany this,” says Karin Humphreys, one of the study’s authors and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behavior at McMaster University. “We don’t mean to dismiss any of the recently medicalized conditions we tested as trivial. Rather, because public understanding of these conditions is still in flux, they are an excellent place to examine how different terminology impacts this understanding.” The study was the second part of a larger study on how people understand and interpret disease.

 

Researchers asked undergraduate students to rate either the medical or lay label for recently medicalized disorders (such as erectile dysfunction disorder vs. impotence) and established medical conditions (such as a myocardial infarction vs. heart attack) for their perceived seriousness, disease representativeness, and prevalence. The researchers found students considered the medical label of the recently medicalized disease to be more serious, more representative of a disease, and more likely to be a rare condition than the same disease described using common language. A similar pattern was not seen in the established medical conditions, even when controlled for severity.

 

“A simple switch in terminology can result in a real bias in perception,” says Meredith Young, one of the study’s lead authors and a graduate student in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behavior at McMaster University. “These findings have implications for many areas, including medical communication with the public, corporate advertising and public policy.”

 

The pattern of results has implications for the patient, researchers found. If a patient is informed that she has gastroesophageal reflux disease, for example, rather than chronic heartburn, she might think she is more ill. An important implication is that patient’s understanding of the condition heavily influences how she goes about taking care of her own health.

 

“We can see that there are a number of conditions where the medicalese term has, over the past ten years or so, been really rising in how often it is used, compared to the lay term for the same thing,” says Humphreys. “This is particularly important when you have lots of conditions that have recently become medicalized, some of them possibly through the influence of pharmaceutical companies, who want to make you think that you have a disease that will need to be treated with a drug.”