FP Report -- July 1999
Analogy potpourri
Terry Ruhl, M.D., who presented "The Heart Is Like a Pump: Medical Analogies in Patient Education" at the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine's spring conference, hopes to eventually collect enough good analogies to create a Web page for them. If you have an analogy that meets the criteria listed in the story above, e-mail the analogy to him at truhl@usa.net.
Here are some analogies either presented by Ruhl or crafted by participants during the session:
- The outer ear canal is like a conveyer belt. If you leave it alone, it'll push the wax from the inside out. Using swabs to remove the wax can actually push it in farther and pack it against the eardrum.
- A punch biopsy is like a little round cookie cutter. It removes a little spot on your skin.
- Growth charts and percentiles can be confusing. If your son is in the 35th percentile for height, that's like taking 100 children who are the same age as your son and lining them up from shortest to tallest, with your child being 35th in line.
- The eye is like a camera. The lens of the eye is like the lens of the camera. The retina is like the film of the camera. If the lens of the camera gets dirty, the pictures you take aren't going to be very good. If the lens of the eye gets dirty (for example, if you have a cataract), you're not going to see very well.
- Using antibiotics to treat a cold is like putting bug killer on weeds. You're not stopping the problem, and you may be killing bugs that are good for your garden.
- High cholesterol is like hair that clogs up your drain.
- Preventive health care is like preventive maintenance on your car. It's easier and less expensive to keep your car running smoothly than getting it fixed when it breaks down.
FP Report is published by the AAFP News Department. Copyright © 1999 by American Academy of Family Physicians.
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