What Khullar says:
Throughout the article “The Trouble With Medicine’s Metaphors” Khullar spoke on the relation between patients and the use of metaphors being used throughout their treatment. Khullar brought up how the roles between a hospital setting with a physician, patient, healthcare team and the disease could all be tied together by using metaphors. Physicians were compared to the commander because they were both leader roles, the combatant was compared to the patient, the health care team was compared to allies and the disease was compared to the enemy that they were all trying to fight off. Khullar’s purpose for tying these two settings together was to show how we can use metaphors to better our understanding on situations that we aren’t familiar with. Khullar also spoke about how when patients were explained their treatment in a different way through metaphors, patients were able to understand what the doctor was trying to say much better. Having the doctor use metaphors made the patients feel that the doctor cared about actually educating their patients on what the situation actually was. Khullar further expanded o the idea of how metaphors can change the way the patients feel by using an example on how when patients were told their disease was an enemy, this caused patients to feel depressed and anxious. Overall Khullar was addressing that metaphors can help one another communicate and change the way people can view a certain situation or idea.
What I say:
While reading this article I found a lot of relationships through text to text. I compared Geary’s ideas with Khullar’s ideas and I found them to be very similar. Khullar talked about how metaphors can invent ideas, when Geary talked about the KiKi and Bouba study, he spoke on how different sounds of words can invent different ideas of shapes to people. I felt while reading Khullar’s article that using metaphors in the medical field can dictate how each treatment is handled. As a future health care provider, I want to make sure my patients understand the treatments and procedures as they are happening to make them feel more comfortable. I think that when you use metaphors, they allow you to explain ideas in a way your patients will understand better. Having your patients understanding the details of their health will allow them to feel more comfortable as you being their health care provider. I say that using metaphors in the medical field is like trying to communicate with a child. When you speak to a young child and they don’t understand bigger concepts yet, you have to use metaphors to break down the idea for the child to understand better. I also say that although using metaphors can expand the ideas between people, they can also have an effect on people’s behaviors and reactions. Khullar mentioned that when one group received the word virus and the other group got the word beast, both groups reacted much differently. I feel that metaphors can be dangerous because using the wrong metaphor might give someone the wrong idea and cause them to act a certain way that they may not have acted if a different metaphor was used to get the idea across.
Quotes:
Khullar- “Metaphors are a fundamental mechanism through which our minds conceptualize the world around us, especially in the face of complexity.” I felt like this quote related to the KiKi and Bouba experiment done that Geary mentioned, addressing how different words and metaphors can have a strong effect on how we look at things or develop patterns.
Erard- “Consider the thing to be communicated- a business strategy, a discovery, a new look at a familiar social problem- and then make a pseudo-mistake.” I felt like this quote means allowing you to make mistakes with metaphors even if they are wrong. In Khullar’s article metaphors were used to compare medicine to the military positions, even though they don’t exactly have the same work roles, the overall look of each role is similar. This to me is a pseudo-mistake.
Geary- “We utter about six metaphors a minute.” I felt like this quote was short but it meant a lot. I feel like this fact addressed by Geary allowed the reader to see how important metaphors really are in our everyday lives and how often people use them without even realizing.
