Effective medical communication as disease prevention in extreme conditions of Northern latitudes contrastive Russian-German terminology study

Abstract

Effective communication between doctor and patient is the key to successful treatment. Statistics show that 80 % of medical errors are caused by incorrectly transferred information during medical consultations [1, 12]. Coherent communication at the medical level is especially important in extreme environments, such as the Far North and the Arctic, where the conditions for medical care are not always favourable. Despite the universality of medical terminology, there are significant differences in its application in practice, especially in the discourse between doctor and patients due to the lack of balance in the specialised knowledge that underpins such communication. Whereas doctors communicate at a highly specialised level, patients communicate at a layman’s level. This is reflected in the terms used during the consultation, more or less specialised or more generalised. Observations of this phenomenon are not new [6, 2, 3, 12], but there is still a need to study the significant differences in the use of certain terms at both monolingual and interlingual levels. Thus, after analys ing extensive content data from medical consultations in Russian and German, the main differences in the use of specialised terminology (terminological variation) were identified. Аll point to the existence of a phenomenon of terminological asymmetry was established at the monolingual and cross-lingual level. This work aims to contribute to the effectiveness of professional global communication on a cognitive level to improve medical care also in extreme situations in northern latitudes.