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Dhruv Khullar speaks to the issue of how society approaching fighting against a disease or form of cancer versus how the patients themselves feel they should approach it. Khullar gets at the concept of military language which is used heavily in the medical field when people describe themselves as “fighters” or when Doctor’s describe their battle as a “war against cancer” for example. Early on, Khullar brings up multiple questions in his topic of discussion saying “Does this patient feel she lost the battle because she didn’t fight hard enough?” and “Might she have suffered less at the end if she hadn’t felt compelled to try one more drug, determined to soldier on?” Throughout his writing, he continuously references the words “Soldier” and “War” to reiterate his main idea that military language is widely used throughout the medical field. He later on points out how every aspect of a hospital can be directly relating to something involving war such as “the enemy (cancer), a commander (the physician), a combatant (the patient), allies (the healthcare team)” which is used to give his audience a clear mental image of how similar these concepts are between hospitals and the military directly relating to the reason we often times correlate them without even realizing.

Coming into this reading, I didn’t know exactly what to expect from hearing the title “Medicine’s Metaphors” even though the very minute I began analyzing it, I recognized a handful of these military terms that I had never directly associated before. At first, I didn’t exactly agree on Khullar’s take on the whole concept as he seemed to take it into a negative direction. I didn’t like that he called out the fact that these terms can lead to people making themselves feel bad if they “lose the battle” because in my mind personally, no matter how long it takes for a fatal illness to kill you, then you’ve still won as long as you’ve lived the best possible life. There is no such idea as losing when it comes to this matter which is something I wished he noted. However, despite his lack of consideration, I felt as though the entirety of this passage was intriguing. The background on perception with the “hot coffee”, “hand washing”, and “cities crisis” tests enveloped this idea that metaphors truly can change perception even more than a politician (noted later). I thought this was a good way to get back to his main point so people could understand how a Physician telling a patient “this is going to be a battle” could have such an extreme impact on their perception. The point that his home was when he quoted “They deserve to be the keepers of the lens through which they view their illnesses.” This was something I pointed out at the beginning which is that in the end, it’s up for the patient to decide their most effective coping mechanisms, not the one’s around them.

 

Geary

“But whenever we give a thing a name that belongs to something else, we give it a whole network of analogies too”

This quote gives a good insight to why metaphors stand out and are more valuable then we think.

 

Erard

“Designers look for a common conceptual domains in which analogical mappings are easy to find”

This gives a background on how people such as Erard look to relate their metaphors to the public simply but effectively.

 

Khullar

“Ultimately, any metaphor – military or otherwise – is not inherently good or bad. Rather, the utility of each depends on a patient’s culture, values, experiences, and preferences.”

This line gives a nice summary to how metaphors have no true intent, but how the public perceives based on their own prior knowledge and experiences is what gives them all the meaning and power they possess today.

The second time I read Erard’s writing on metaphors, I found that I really understood the specific examples he provides throughout his reading far better than the first. The most helpful part of my better understandings were the group activities we did in class the same day. I found that most of what I was highlighting and annotating were from the questions being asked in class. This helped a lot because the points I highlighted before were mainly just the basic topics on metaphors and a quick summary on each paragraph, but the second time reading, I found that I was able to go much more in depth to solve the questions we did in class and achieve a better understanding on the entirety of the reading itself.

One of the topics I understood more were the pseudo-mistakes. When I first read this, I didn’t really understand what he was talking about at all and skimmed through that passage. However, after talking with group members in class, I understood the second time reading that these pseudo-mistakes were used to generate a list of metaphors to narrow it down to the best one. That made sense why Erard chose the word pump to relate to the paintbrush. I also recognized the “evidence is a weapon” line that was mentioned in class that I didn’t highlight the first time. I realized if one can use a metaphor in their debate, it can get many others on board with their specific argument.

One of the other main topics Erard talked about a lot were the “windows and doors that frame toward the reality outside”. This was another point I didn’t quite perceive strongly on my first reading, but after discussing it with classmates and rereading it, I know now that these people who create metaphors have the power to move this metaphorical window around to show people a certain aspect of the outside world that many weren’t familiar with.

Finally, one word I noticed that was still unfamiliar when I was glossing the text the second time was the word semantic which was used in the line “The richness of the semantic resources that a designer built-on biases and preferences” … “block certain kinds of understandings”. After looking it up, I realized this line was saying that you can strengthen the language in your metaphor so much that it may permanently stick with that person and their opinion on other perspectives is “blocked” as their mind is only set on one idea simply because of a metaphor.

 

There were a handful of points that stuck out to me throughout “See Through Words” by Michael Erard. Early on he writes that metaphors are “meant to make someone realize they’ve only been looking at one side of a thing” which was a great introduction into the rest of his paper. This quote gave a basis of finding new perceptions of things. It was simple but enforced people to look at both sides. There will always be a handful of people who think differently than the others, but if one’s metaphor can get the majority of people to think and agree with what they’re saying without much conflict, then you’ve written something well.

This led to a later quote when Erard talked about the idea of “mapping between two concepts” and trying to build the best metaphorical bridge possible. One of the examples discussed earlier was the health department who used the metaphor “the department holds the key for unlocking health” which ties back into the use of the bridge connecting two concepts. Different people will perceive the space between those two concepts differently (as noted) which is unavoidable. If you can map out these concepts after sorting out the best metaphor from the group, you may just find one that works the best.

The last quote I found intriguing was “To design a metaphor, you have to get beyond what people say they like or don’t like.” This meant to be you have to spark emotions. You can just write “The hospital is a home” because not everyone will really key into what you’re saying. You need to be in depth and descriptive and say “The hospital is the cure for life” because it strikes a certain emotion that will get people to hopefully become brave enough to walk in if they were afraid before. When comparing two different topics however like the children and the flowers, it’s important to prevent hierarchy as Erard mentioned. In this case with the hospital, it seems to be alright to use the art of emotion because it only focuses on one subject.

I like the way this ePortfolio is set up even though I haven’t really learned a lot about it. I’m sure I’ll be more interested in the website in a few months once I’ve started generating more posts and editing my own personal page. For now, I think it’s a great way to get my own thoughts out onto a website where other people can comment and interact. It seems like Facebook except a lot more formidable and classy. I’ve never really used a program like this before, the closest thing was Google Classroom but everyone was linked onto the same website. I definitely like the idea of having my own page and link more than just posting on a single page that everyone shares.