Special Feature: 2009 AAPM&R Annual Assembly Plenary Presentation
Prescriptions for Optimal Healing Julie K. Silver, MD As a physiatrist, I spend a lot of time explaining to people what I do. I hear from colleagues that they are in the same predicament. My sister, a pediatrician, doesn’t have this problem. People instantly understand the job description of a pediatrician without any explanation. For better or worse, I generally begin by saying that I help people to heal physically from injuries and illnesses. I often expand this by remarking that physical and emotional healing typically go together—the better individuals feel physically, the better they feel emotionally, too. Physiatrists and other rehabilitation professionals have a mantra, “focus on function.” This important concept informs every aspect of our work. If someone is functioning without any problems, we’re not needed. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for many individuals. Which is why, although we’re a small specialty that is often poorly understood, we’re extremely popular with overflowing schedules and grateful patients who spread the word about the doctors who are able to provide people with prescriptions for optimal healing. I recall hearing in residency someone say that good health is a temporary condition. Writer Susan Sontag translated this idea beautifully when she wrote, Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place [1]. I appreciate great translations because they help both doctors and patients enormously. In fact, the role of the physician is as a translator— conveying vitally important health information to those who desperately need it. To the uninformed and uninitiated, this may be construed as “dumbing things down.” However, the very idea of this is disrespectful, and the vast majority of physicians strive, above all things, to be respectful to their patients. Therefore, we must learn to become superb translators of medical information. In my role as the Chief Editor of Books at Harvard Health Publications, the consumer health branch of Harvard Medical School, I consider myself a professional translator. As an editor, I work with my Harvard colleagues to help them translate their research and special knowledge into consumer health books that carry the Harvard Medical School imprimatur. Our millions of readers come from nearly every country in the world. They are farmers, teachers, construction workers, engineers, and yes, even doctors. Regardless of their formal education, we approach them as intelligent people who want to know more about how they can improve their health. In short, we aim for an awesome translation of complicated health research and information. My skills as a professional translator improve every year. It is a skill, like any other, that one is not born with but rather develops over time. At some point I may reread this editorial and most likely I’ll wish that I had written things differently. In the future, I will read this having greater skill as a professional translator and with a more critical eye than I have now. And although I may wish that I had known enough now to do an even better translation, I hope that I will also recognize how much I’ve learned in the interim. There are many things that go into a great translation. One of these comes from the writer’s mantra, “show; don’t tell.” Telling at best tends to render a boring translation and at worst makes the author sound too authoritarian and overbearing. An example of “telling” is something like, “Doctors make a lot of mistakes, especially when they are in training.” My colleague, Harvard neurosurgeon Atul Gawande, wrote PM&R
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J.K.S. Harvard Medical School. Address correspondence to J.K.S.; e-mail: Julie_Silver@ hms.harvard.edu Disclosure: 3A; 4A; 5A; 9, founder of Oncology Rehab Partners Disclosure Key can be found on the Table of Contents and at www.pmrjournal.org Presented at the AAPM&R Annual Assembly in Austin, TX, October 22, 2009. Submitted for publication December 29, 2009; accepted December 31, 2009.
© 2010 by the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Vol. 2, 94-100, February 2010 DOI: 10.1016/j.pmrj.2009.12.014