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Clear Non-Jargon Language Analysis

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[RS] Documenting Symptoms in Clear Non-Jargon Language
{OSS: Discuss how to document symptoms in journals with good descriptions of time/date, duration, intensity, and quality. Give good positive and negative examples. Be careful to avoid having an overwhelming number of symptoms and confusing day-to-day issues like a minor headache of muscle pain after jogging 5 miles as a symptom. Discuss “pain on a scale of one to ten” line here. When one goes to the doctor, they often get asked “are you in any pain.” If the answer is “yes” then they are asked to rate it on a scale of 1 – 10 where 10 is the worst pain you have ever felt. Discuss how to rate the pain as objectively as possible, without underestimating it, or overestimating it. Do …show more content…

In the context of a patient seeking answers to medical concerns a patient may fear for example that pain is due to cancer because a loved one died of cancer. This fear will tend to influence their search for information and the interpretation of that information from books, the Internet, and even doctors. Patients will tend to accept any data that confirms their fear and reject or disproportionately undervalue that which does not support their fear. Confirmation bias is among the most common type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. It likely has lead to the polarization of political views that is seen in the world today. The effect of confirmation bias is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People tend to interpret ambiguous data as supporting their pre-existing belief. This bias also is evident in belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations). It is simple to tell someone to keep an open mind to avoid confirmation bias but in truth this is quite difficult to do in practice. A patient may combat this tendency by educating themselves in proper reasoning and taking care to garner information from a wide spectrum of balanced

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