Transcript

ERICA BORGSTROM

She's poorly? He's really unwell. She's palliative. These are phrases that I often hear when I'm doing research in palliative and end-of-life care, but what do they really mean?

As an anthropologist, it took me a while in my field work in hospitals, hospices, and care homes in England, to figure out that these phrases were code.

Code language can be really useful, if you want to keep information between certain groups of people only, but when talking about end-of-life care, it can actually, be quite unhelpful.

It can make it really unclear for the dying person and those around them, to know what's going on and what they might be able to do.

There's lots of examples of unclear language use in medicine, particularly in palliative and end-of-life care.

In England, people might use euphemisms to talk about death and dying because they think it might make it easier to talk about a difficult subject. But we know cross-culturally, that other places talk about death more openly and frankly. And that death isn't necessarily, a taboo not to be spoken about.

The language we use to talk about end-of-life care matters. It matters because it conveys the values we attribute to life and death.

For one of my latest projects, I'm looking at the language used when decisions have been made to provide no further medical intervention or treatment.

For example, there's the cliche that we say, there's nothing more that can be done. Now, this is often uttered at a time when palliative care teams might still be exploring alternative methods for symptom management and treatment.

There seems to be a contradiction then, between what we're saying and hearing and what people are actually doing.

Now, from my research experience, rarely, when there is an absence of medical treatment, is there actually, an absence of care. So why are we using language, or code, that might make us think otherwise?