“The Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphors” by Dhruv Khullar is basically saying that metaphors are used frequently by doctors and by people who help people with illness and disease. These people tell patients to “fight” their way through the illness but no one knows how the patients are thinking. Will telling them to “fight” make them feel more positive or will it make them feel pressured and stressed out? It should be the patients call whether or not they want to refer to their treatment as “fighting” or not.
So after reading this article it really opened up my eyes on how many metaphors are used in the medical world. Also after Khullar explained how using the term “fighting” can be negative to patients I do believe no one should really tell them to “fight.” If the patients want to refer to their recovery as “fighting” then everyone else can also refer to it as fighting. People can feel pressured if they have to fight because what if they don’t know how? We should just all in all stop using war terms in the medical world because it does no good for a numerous amount of people.
The three quotes I chose from the three articles were, “whenever we deal with anything abstract—ideas, emotions, feelings, concepts, thoughts– we inevitably resort to metaphor” by Geary. “People often ask whether these new metaphors actually change how people think. They can” by Erard. “The words we choose to describe illness are powerful. They carry weight and valence creating the milieu in which goals of care are discussed and treatment plans designed” by Khullar. I chose these quotes because they all relate to how metaphors can affect our emotions and how much power they have on how perceptions.
