How do you say, "I have a cold"?

Reporter Jamie Holguin gives an overview in the Canton Repository of the basics of hospital translation, with "some blunders attributable to language barriers" culled from a 2002 study:

Like the elderly Russian man who was instructed to undergo a battery of expensive tests for angina after an emergency room physician misunderstood his complaints of “urgina” -- Russian for sore throat. Or the migrant worker from Oaxaca, Mexico, who was committed to an Oregon psychiatric ward as a paranoid schizophrenic, only to be released two years later after it was discovered that he was simply speaking an Indian dialect.

More significantly, perhaps, is recent research into providing transnational medical histories for foreign patients, who sometimes seem to appear as clean slates when they arrive in the U.S.

The following a-ha moment provides the epigraph to a recent study by the National Diabetes Education Program:

A middle-aged Cambodian woman had had an excellent relationship with her American doctor for 9 years, but he had no idea that she had been tortured. He had only partial success in controlling her type 2 diabetes. After attending a training session on treating the effects of terrorism after the events of September 11, 2001, the doctor asked the patient for the first time whether she had undergone extreme violence or torture. She revealed that two of her children had died of starvation in Cambodia, her husband had been taken away violently and disappeared, and she had been sexually violated under the Khmer Rouge. More recently, in the United States, her remaining daughter had been nearly fatally stabbed by a gang that burglarized her home. Since September 11, the patient had taken to barricading herself in her house, leaving only to see her doctor.

When the doctor became aware of the patient’s traumatic history, he used a screening tool to explore the effects of her traumas, diagnosing major depression. Over time, he was able to treat the depression with medication and counseling, eventually bringing the diabetes under control as well.

— Dr. Richard Mollica. Surviving Torture. New England Journal of Medicine 2004.

In New York, too, the past doesn't go away. A look at the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture in a future post.