Serious, True and Impossible

Amir Mizroch of The Jerusalem Post complains about the vague and contradictory language of a hospital spokesman who described Ariel Sharon's condition as "serious, stable and critical."

I've had similar problems with hospital spokesmen and spokeswomen. United States medical privacy laws (see Slate's explanation) certainly create an extra chilling effect--I'm not sure if Israel has that problem--but my experience and Mizroch's column tell me that doctors, hospital spokesmen and reporters need to agree on some language and parameters for describing patients' conditions.

First, if we're going to keep using words like "stable," "critical," "serious," "good," etc., we need to give them strict definitions for medical-news usage. Spokesmen have described patients to me as "stable and critical," I think, to which my editor quickly and confidently responded, "you can't be stable and critical." This means that nobody is really sure what exactly all these terms are supposed to mean.

In the case of a public figure, hospitals seem pretty willing to provide details about procedures, which only makes me wonder why the Hadassah spokesman didn't describe Sharon's condition in more specific terms. Any transparent government should be willing to provide these details:

Is the patient conscious? Talking? Mobile? In a lot of pain? What good/bad signs will doctors be looking for?

Maybe it's too intrusive to reveal some of these details about private citizens injured in car crashes or other accidents. I think, though, that detailed medical information about injured crime suspects should be made public to some extent, if only to allow the press to monitor officers' use of force and public spending on suspects' medical care.

And, as Mizroch says, reporters should aggressively press spokesmen to define their clumsy terms.