Blog 3

“The Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphors” by Dhruv Khullar was a fascinating article about how military metaphors are commonly used within the medical field and can create better understandings than literal words themselves. Throughout the text, Khullar describes how the use of these specific metaphors by patients could lead to them creating bad thoughts and blaming themselves for not being able to win their “fight.” He points out that when this language is used by patients, their quality of life is negatively affected as compared to those who thought more positively. On the other hand, he also mentioned how some patients who used military words had a more positive outlook on their treatment by thinking of being resilient and having the determination to beat their illness.

While reading Khullar’s article, I didn’t realize how often military terms and metaphors are actually used in the medical field and how figurative language is more meaningful in this case. I also found that he had an overall negative opinion about the use of military terms and how patients fighting an illness would be hiding their true feelings and leading to an overall poor quality of life, which I did not agree with. Throughout the passage, it seemed that he was trying to show how metaphors could lead to this way of thinking by mentioning a study done comparing solutions people came up with to “help solve a city’s crime problem” There were two groups that were presented with different metaphors and they both denied the idea that the metaphors shaped their different ways of thinking. I thought it was interesting how Khullar used this study to relate back to his idea of how people think about their illness in a military sense, whether it is in a positive or negative light.

See Through Words: “The challenge for the designer is to generate lots of pseudo-mistakes, some of which can be used for thinking and that have the power to stick around.” I chose this quote in particular because it shows how metaphors are created to generate new ideas and relations between things that people would not often associate.

The Trouble with Medicine’s Metaphors: “Metaphors allow doctors to develop a common language with patients, and offer patients an avenue to express their emotions and exert agency over their conditions.” This quote had deep meaning behind it because it showed how significant metaphors are and how they can help people to better understand a situation.

Metaphorically Speaking: “Whenever we solve a problem or make a discovery, we compare what we know with what we don’t know.” This quote relates to the idea given in the prompt because it describes how humans create associations with ideas or concepts that we are already familiar with and relate them with things that we don’t know to get a better understanding of the new idea.