I would like to submit a change from referring to people in the healthcare setting as “patients”. The label, cognate with the Greek pathos – “suffering” – meaning “one who suffers”, carries with it a bit of a connotation, no? Seems to me that if the broadly stated goal of healthcare is to enable people to enjoy their lives, then a blanket term which consigns all humans to the inescapable travail of intractable suffering may be misaligned with the mission.
This would be like calling all students from K to college a bunch of “dummies”, all gym goers a bunch of “weaklings”, or the silver haired saints in the pews of a church a truckload of “sinners”.
Certainly there are those who are suffering to which the label would apply. But the whole point of healing is to progress people from the pathetic state they come in and take them out of suffering, and that for good.
More than a branding issue, it is a metaphor for healthcare in the United States.
Thought Butter 