A Name Means Nothing
Lesson 573: Just because your patient is named “Betsy” or “Kelly” does not mean she speaks English. You will look less stupid if you ask first, instead of rapidly explaining her pap smear and ultrasound results in English for two minutes, only for her to finally get up the courage to interrupt you. That is all.
(Also, “discharge” in Spanish is “secreción” or “reflujo.”)
How does assuming your patient speaks english make you look stupid? If they don’t understand it is their responsibility to indicate to you by a quick “no habla” and then you can get a translator or the dreaded “blue phone.” If it takes two minutes for them to screw up their courage to tell you, so what? The stupid one is the patient, soemthing they probably feel keenly.
Jeez, Graham. You don’t have to be a martyr in every patient encounter. English is the national language. I once spoke English to a Greek-speaking patient for a minute or two before the son told me his mother didn’t speak a lick of english.
Had been in the United States for fifteen years.
I happen to speak Greek but come on now. Not speaking the national language of your adopted country is a personal problem, easily rectified for most patients by a little effort except that for some odd reason we make it easy not to do it. I lived in Japan for almost two years and made a sincere effort to speak a little Japanese fer’ Christ’s sake, a language which has nothing in common at all with English.
Colloquially (here among the Hispanic population in Virginia), discharge is flujo. I am a Spanish-speaker, but I didn’t learn this until my Ob/Gyn rotation. Oh, and water breaking is “rompe de agua”. =)
“…easily rectified by most patients by a little effort..”
Learning English is actually pretty difficult for some people, particularly adults. You know nothing about this woman — whether she ever sat a day in a classroom in her life, for instance, which has a tremendous impact on how readily she will access (and be successful in) an English class. Maybe her husband hasn’t supported her to learn English — in some households, a woman’s ability to speak English means greater freedom and independence for her, which isn’t always seen as a good thing by some husbands. I work with hundreds of English as a Second Language learners each year, and I can tell you from first-hand experience, not one of them finds it takes just “a little effort”. Some women are learning in secret because their husband can keep them under control better when the woman is wholly dependent on them. At any rate, I’m not sure who this “we” is that “makes it easy for them not to do it”, but you might just consider that you don’t know the whole story.
Cecelia is correct: flujo is discharge. Reflujo is “reflux.” Don’t think about the implications there. ;)