"I don't know what any of those words mean"

I hear this from friends and family a lot. They come home from the doctor and I'll ask how it went. Frequently they say something like, "I don't know". So as we discuss the appointment, I discover that they understood little to nothing of what they were told, and were so confused they didn't even know what questions to ask, because the doctor was speaking Medicalese and most people speak plain old layperson.

Does this scenario sound familiar? Is that you nodding your head while thinking "I don't know what any of those words mean"? I get it. And this is no disrespect to my colleagues in healthcare. Every profession has it's own language. Ever been at a restaurant and heard them call out for "Adam and Eve on a raft"? "Three tacos all day"? Or a computer programmer talk about stacks, Unix, unicorny, blockchain, etc? That's just how we're used to talking all day to our coworkers, and sometimes we forget how to turn it off. So we're all probably guilty of this a little bit.

The problem is, the healthcare scenario is a little different, because the stakes are pretty high if you don't understand what you're being told. You don't follow up as instructed because you don't understand the urgency, or you don't take the medication because you're too embarassed to admit that you don't really know why it's been prescribed. And because sometimes we're just too confused, overwhelmed or embarassed to ask a question, we leave without a proper understanding of what is going on medically. And this can have disastrous consequences.