I remember that many years ago, most of medical documents in my country were written in Latin. At least diagnoses and prescriptions were in that language. The medical students learn this language nowadays too (though on a very basic level). The current recomendation is that everything should be written in Polish, so that the Patients can understand it. But in practice we can see everything now: Latin, Polish, English, acronyms taken from all of these languages. Sometimes two or three languages in one sentence or nothing but the international number of the disease. This is hard to understand not only for patients but for the doctors as well.
And here are the questions I'd like to ask:
1) Do you know what language is used in medical documents in your country?
2) Do you think that everything should be written in the official language of the country only? Note that e.g. English medical vocabulary is based mainly on Latin (except for popular words like body part's names) but there are languages which have their own names for almost everything.
3) Or maybe in the age of globalization and migration of people would be better to choose one language as the international standard?
Documents given to patients are written in Serbian. Usually there is a diagnosis written in Latin and some medical terminology is taken from Latin. So it is a mixture of Serbian and Latin. Or maybe we can think of this Latin as loanwords. I haven't seen any English from a Serbian doctor ever. It wouldn't serve the purpose. Patients don't have to speak English and doctors don't have to speak English either. Instructions for use of medications have to be in Serbian completely.
Example: Myocardial infarction is in Serbian "infarkt miokarda", so pretty much the same. Infarction comes from Latin, myocard comes from Greek. This kind of words tend to be international. I've never really thought of them as English words, but frankly I don't know if they may have reached all of us through English. I assume not because I think we used them before English was the world language. And our older doctors who don't know any English use them as well.
Indeed bypass (bajpas) is used in Serbian, but again it's just a loanword, it's not like doctors write their diagnoses in English.
In addition, for patient's sake to understand the prescription by the doctors, many parts of the chart have been well compiled in local language and it is not so complicated to proceed as long as the standard can be discussed and well stipulated. Localizing chart in a local language with professional terms annotation may be a good method of keeping both sides happy.
