Medicine according to children

BarcelonaSome medical terms are more difficult to understand than others, especially when discussing complex pathologies or rare tests. Children, however, may initially encounter this difficulty with even the most basic vocabulary, encompassing everyday health terms and related concepts. For this reason, medical vocabulary specialists from Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona have collaborated with over 3,000 children and young people from schools and institutes throughout Catalonia to develop a platform to explain medical terms to children in their own words, using new digital and multimedia formats. This platform, called Diximed, is aimed at children and families, as well as pediatricians and educators. "You have to approach the child's needs, but keeping in mind a psycholinguistic theory that says nothing is learned in leaps and bounds, but always from what is already known. And if what a child knows is incorrect and no one explains it to them, they will always end up carrying that misconception," says Rosa Estopà, principal investigator of the Lex project, a research group at Iulaterm. To carry out this initiative, the participating children were asked to explain what they knew about certain words, such as flu, louse, vaccine, coronavirus, cancer either chickenpoxAmong many others, they were asked to draw them. "We told them they had to do it as if they were explaining it to a child their age who came from another planet," Estopà recalls.

Afterwards, the group of UPF linguists involved in the project "deconstructed," analyzed, and classified these definitions. This was a way to verify which ideas were well understood, but also to see which ones had a toxic or distorting component. "For example, we saw that many children defined cancer as a contagious disease. You, to define it, would never state that it isn't, but we saw the need to specify this. If we don't, this idea stays in their minds and they continue to think that cancer is contagious," Estopà explains.

Accompanied by drawings

This initiative also served as a pedagogical tool, as in the case of the word anorexiaSince they saw that the children were defining it as a syndrome that only affects girls, it was necessary to clarify that boys can also suffer from it. "All the decisions we have made in this dictionary have been made very consciously, based on what the children know, what they don't know, and what, for whatever reason, they know in a distorted way," Estopà emphasizes.

The final result has been a dictionary that brings together a very broad vocabulary with definitions made by language professionals based on the knowledge of the children who participated in the project. All the definitions have been reviewed by pediatricians from the Official College of Physicians of Girona and the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona to ensure that there were no explanations that were not scientifically sound. "It has been through this prior knowledge of the children's population that we have been able to construct more empathetic definitions, better suited to their cognitive needs," Estopà specifies.

So, one recipe is a document written by the doctor that states the medications you should take and a cavity is A tooth disease caused by bacteria that create holes in your teeth and cause a black stain to appear.Each definition is accompanied by drawings with which these children have represented these medical terms or with audio recordings of the children's voices, narrating the final definitions.

Resource for pediatricians

On the same platform in which this dictionary is located (diccionaridemedicina.app/web), you can also consult an illustrated atlas of the human body and interactive educational games, as well as a section with specific vocabulary related to the COVID-19 pandemic, among other digital resources. "The COVID-19 pandemic had a very strong impact on all of society, and we have seen that, afterwards, children are more assertive in their explanations regarding terms they learned during this period, using more specialized terminology, but they have an impressive level of cognitive confusion. Children experienced much more confusion than expected regarding such fundamental terms as these." virus, bacterium either vaccine", Estopá acknowledges.

In any case, this platform, which has been translated into Spanish, Galician, Basque, and English, is a database suitable for families, but also for pediatricians, to better communicate with young children. "Pediatric professionals told me that if health problems are discussed at home from a very young age and medical terms are used naturally, when health problems become serious, which usually occurs in adolescence, we've already made significant progress, because children are able to explain what's happening to them."

School is also another important space to work on this vocabulary, as it can complement the basic curriculum explanations for each grade level that cover the human body or facilitate the treatment of specific health-related cases.