“The Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphors” by Dhruv Khullar is an article that describes the controversial use of military terms to enable patients to better understand their illness and what they must do to overcome it. The text opens with a patient with a leukemia diagnosis who describes herself as a “fighter”. The author compares this woman to her aunt who she thought was a fighter but unfortunately “lost the battle”. This is the basis for the rest of the article which discusses the pros and cons of using military terms in the medical field. The ultimate conclusion is that this results in more harm than good.

I believe that using this metaphor truly helps patients who have little experience with medicine understand what they’re in for. For instance, Dhruv Khullar directly states that results from a study in 2010 proved that “physicians who use more metaphors were seen as better communicators” (Khullar). This is a blatant indicator that metaphors are a positive matter in the medical world. “See through words” by Michael Erard also gives way to the notion that metaphors are effective in medicine. He says, “It’s as if this new idea…had taken them by the hand…and the metaphor was showing them things” (Erard). This shows that a concept that was unable to be grasped before, was now comprehensible and even simpler. James Geary also provides support to this claim. He takes this notion even further by verifying that “metaphor also matters because it influences decisions by activating analogies” (Geary). This is significant because he doesn’t just make the affirmation that metaphor helps us to understand, he goes even further to say that our important medical decisions could have been altered if we did not have the level of comprehension of the situation that. the metaphor provided.