Understanding the Languages of Biomedicine and Health

The purpose of this course is to assist learners in the lifelong process of increasing their understanding of the languages of biomedicine and health. Most of the learning materials will be presented in English. However, the major principles presented in this programme appear to be equally applicable to most western European languages. The course consists of 5 modules : 

1. Understanding technical vocabulary (including controlled vocabularies and ontologies)

2.  Readability and Comprehensibility

3. Scientific Discourse

4. Content Guidelines

5. The Social Contract and Scientific Writing

Introduction:

Language is the medium in which health sciences education, research and practice operate. At the interprofessional level, much communication takes place in what many think of as biomedical English. However, if we examine our shared language critically, we soon realize that it is quite different from general English and perhaps deserves to be recognized as a language in its own right.

This is certainly justifiable if we apply the same standards to biomedical language as we do to the classification of other languages. There is no single well accepted standard of what constitutes a language, but one attractive definition of language is “a reciprocally comprehensible system of communication.” Clearly, general English and biomedical language do not meet this standard of being the same language. Most native English speakers, even well educated people, cannot understand medical texts or research papers. At the same time, many researchers and clinicians who are not native English speakers can converse quite effectively within a limited domain, for example neurophysiology or oncology, but can scarcely manage a simple conversation in daily English.

On this basis then, we may argue that the shared language of the biomedical and health community might better be called biomedical language rather than biomedical English. Obviously, biomedical language borrows much, including grammatical conventions, from general English. What then is distinctive about this new language? Perhaps the most distinctive feature of biomedical language is a technical vocabulary which is largely incomprehensible to those outside of the community. Therefore, we begin our introduction to the languages of biomedicine and health with an examination of just what constitutes "technical" language.