When treatments do not work, doctors must non-judgementally ask patients why they think a treatment hasn’t worked. As the basis for communicating with patients, choosing to use patient-centred language has been shown to positively influence patient outcomes. A recent article in the journal Medical Humanities is a reminder that failure-based language is all too common in medical discourse. When a medication or treatment does not produce the desired outcome, doctors are quick to label it a “failed treatment”. Doctors must make a conscious effort to remove failure-based language from the collective medical lexicon.

Source: The Irish Times March 09, 2026 17:31 UTC