Terminology in medical reports

Abstract Medical reports provide a record of a patient’s diagnostic or therapeutic process while receiving healthcare. It is, therefore, critical that patients have a good understanding of their medical reports, particularly as various studies show that misunderstanding or failing to understand them can have severe consequences for their health. Today’s medical reports are essentially expository documents in which nominalizations proliferate and where verbs are scarce. This favours the presence of specific medical terminology, which is the main obstacle to comprehension. Based on an analysis of a corpus of medical reports, in this article we, first, identify and study the lexical indicators (including terms of Greek or Latin origin, abbreviations, eponyms, etc.) that hinder understanding of a medical report and, then, correlate these indicators with such textual parameters as cognitive load, semantic opacity, semantic confusion and semantic ambiguity.