The Secret Language of Doctors: Cracking the Code of Hospital Culture

Most people have visited a doctor’s office or emergency room in their lifetime to gain clarity about an ailment or check in after a procedure. While doctors strive to ensure their patients understand their diagnoses, rarely do those outside the medical community understand the words and phrases we hear practitioners yell across a hospital hallway or murmur to a colleague behind office doors. Doctors and nurses use a kind of secret language, comprised of words unlikely to be found in a medical textbook or heard on television. In The Secret Language of Doctors, Dr. Brian Goldman decodes those code words for the average patient. What does it mean when a patient has the symptoms of “incarceritis”? What are “blocking” and “turfing”? And why do you never want to be diagnosed with a “horrendoma”? Dr. Goldman reveals the meaning behind the colorful and secret expressions doctors use to describe difficult patients, situations, and medical conditions—including those they don’t want you to know. Gain profound insight into what doctors really think about patients in this funny and biting examination of modern medical culture.

Dr. Brian Goldman is an emergency physician at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital and the host of CBC Radio’s award-winning program White Coat, Black Art. He is the author of the acclaimed book The Night Shift and his TEDx talk about medical errors, which has been viewed on the Internet almost one million times, has cemented his reputation as one of his generation’s keenest observers of the culture of modern medicine. He lives in Toronto.