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On 06/20/98 Alastair Wyse wrote: >How I hate jargon . I have always maintained that it was designed by >people who knoe very little but are trying to appear knowledgeable . One person's jargon is another's clear, precice prose. These confusing medical terms are meaningless babble to most of us when we first encounter them. But with the use of a medical dictionary and increasing frequency of encountering strange terms, they become familiar and we are comfortable using them. Its learning a new language, Medspeak. I remember how confused we were after Neal's diagnosis, when we were trying to comprehend what the doctors were saying and muddling through what we were reading about PD and its manifestations. Now I have found myself rattling terms like dyskinesia and dystonia off and then suddenly becomming aware of polite confusion on the face of the caregiver of a newly diagnosed PWP (more jargon!) that I am trying to help. Research reports have to be written using terms that are precice in meaning so there will be no fuzziness about the procedures or results when they are read by the colleagues who will judge them. They are a pain for laypersons to read, but after living with PD for a few years, hungry for helpful information, the jargon becomes familiar and just disappears. And that's one language I wish with all my heart that I hadn't needed to learn. Martha Rohrer (CG for Neal, 78/13) [log in to unmask]