Why doctors want to compare your disease to food

Food analogies apparently work well to properly describe and convey how a disease looks, indicate researchers. The comparisons work so well, in fact, that food analogies may eventually make a comeback in medical journals.

The comparisons aren’t for the patient’s sake; they are to help medical students gain a better understanding of what a disease might present like in a client.

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“It is a wonder that, in the midst of the smells and sights of human affliction, a physician has the stomach to think of food at all,” Dr. Ritu Lakhtakia, a pathologist from Sultan Qaboos University, told MNT. “[There are] innumerable allusions to raw and cooked items of food that can reinforce, through imaginative imagery, audiovisual and olfactory understanding of diseases.”

Lakhtakia does not delve into the reason why doctors are drawn to using food as a means of imagery, but speculates that perhaps doctors must have strong stomachs for all they confront, or might make food comparisons due to all the meals they are forced to eat while on the job. Or, like many others in her field believe, the method of comparing a medical condition to food is simply a means of presenting something in a way that can be understood by everyone.

A lesion that looks resembles a walnut, for example, immediately conjures up an image in the minds of most people, even those who have never seen a tumor before. If the description is accurate, they will then have a working understanding of what a physician is talking about.

Of the most common food analogies seen in medical text, researchers indicate these are at the top of the list:

• Walnuts
• Coffee beans
• Nutmeg
• Peanut
• Lemon
• Orange
• Apples
• Pears
• Grapes
• Strawberries
• Watermelons
• Cherries

“Whatever the genesis, these time-honored allusions have been, and will continue to be, a lively learning inducement for generations of budding physicians,” Lakhtakia concluded in her paper. “[The many] “audacious and colorful references” [to food in medical descriptions] “can be attributed in equal measure to the imagination of the author and his or her own or regional food preferences.”

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