Medicine is a language.

Medicine is many things: an art, a science, a vocation, and a calling. A good way to make a difference, a hard way to make a living. But medicine is also a language.

We learn it the way we learn any language: from the ground up. We start with the fundamentals, the vocabulary of medicine—anatomy, biochemistry, physiology—and work our way up to the sentence level: pharmacology, immunology, neuroscience. With that in place, we can start piecing the sentences together to make paragraphs: fundamentals of pediatrics, OB/GYN, cardiology.

Now that we’re beginning to become conversational in our new language, it’s time for the time-tested best way to learn a language quickly: total immersion! Out of the classroom and into the hospital on clinical rotations, we spend weeks getting a feel for the particular dialect of each specialty. Most dialects are close enough to be mutually intelligible or close enough to get by, like American English and British English (in the case of pediatrics and internal medicine) or Spanish and Italian (for neurology and nephrology). Other dialects, like ophthalmology (Romanian—the forgotten Romance language!), are far enough removed to be much harder for non-specialists to understand without translation or a helpful primer. We breathe them all in and taste them on our tongues, trying to figure out the dialect that falls most pleasingly upon our ears, the one that we want to spend the rest of our careers learning, living, and breathing.

Now, we’ve graduated and gone onto residency where, as we master the intricacies of this new dialect of medicine, we start to truly understand it. One day, suddenly, you realize that it’s happened: You’re fluent! This realization comes in different ways to all of us. Some of us experience it as we listen to our own voices expounding on the minutiae of a particularly dense study. Sometimes, it’s the horrified look of your spouse that makes you realize that you truly have no idea what appropriate dinner conversation is anymore. And sometimes, it’s the blank faces of your non-medical friends and family, as you realize that you’ve been speaking in impenetrable jargon for the last ten minutes.

This is the greatest test of our fluency. Our strength as physicians does not lie solely in our ability to diagnose and treat. We need to be able to translate, word and nuance, from our hard-won medical all the way back to plain English. Our patients are waiting anxiously for us to tell them, in language that they can understand, the words that may change their lives.

Medicine is a language.

Paige Kalika is a board-certified pediatric neurologist at the University of Miami. She is certified in headache medicine and has a special interest in neurodiversity and neurodivergence. She can be reached on Bluesky.