When the words a person types don’t match the words a professional writes, the two never meet. Nowhere is that gap wider — or more consequential — than in health.
By Steve Bunker, CEO, Target Patients MD
Every field has an inside language and an outside one. A mechanic hears “it makes a clunking sound when I turn”; the work order says “worn CV joint.” A lawyer’s client says “he owes me money and won’t pay”; the filing says “breach of contract.” Most of the time the translation is invisible and harmless. In healthcare it is neither, because the person doing the searching is often frightened, and the words they reach for are the plainest ones they have.
A patient does not sit down and type “tachycardia.” They type “heart racing at night.” They do not search “epistaxis”; they search “nose won’t stop bleeding.” They do not look for a “myocardial infarction” — they look up “chest feels tight and left arm hurts” at two in the morning, hoping the answer is nothing. The clinical term and the human phrase point at the same thing, but they are different strings of characters, and a search engine matching text does not know they are synonyms unless someone has told it so.
The chart speaks one language; the search box speaks another
This is a translation problem, and it runs in a specific direction. The people who build medical websites are usually fluent in the chart language — it is the language of their training, their notes, their colleagues. So the website they build describes “comprehensive cardiovascular diagnostic services” on a page that a person Googling “why is my heart skipping beats” will never find, because not one of those words appears in what they typed.
The fix is not to dumb anything down. It is to write in both registers at once: the plain phrase the patient uses as the way in, and the precise clinical term right beside it as the confirmation that they have reached someone who actually knows. “If your heart feels like it’s racing or skipping — a sensation doctors call heart palpitations or arrhythmia — here’s what it can mean and when to come in.” That sentence answers the search and signals the expertise in the same breath. The page that leads with the Latin does only the second thing, to an audience that never arrived.
It is worth noticing how much of this is idiom rather than vocabulary. “Throwing up,” “the runs,” “pins and needles,” “a splitting headache,” “my stomach is in knots” — these are figures of speech, and they are exactly what people type. A practice that has never written the phrase “pins and needles” on its neurology page has left the front door locked for everyone who describes numbness the way humans actually describe it.
Why the plain phrase is also the honest one
There is a temptation to treat patient-language writing as a marketing trick — say it the way they search it, capture the click. But the deeper reason to write plainly is that it is truer to the moment. A person searching “chest feels tight” is not asking for a services brochure. They are asking two questions at once: is this dangerous, and what do I do now. Content that meets them in their own words can answer those questions honestly — here is what it might be, here is what is urgent and what can wait, here is how to reach someone — in a way that a page written in institutional language structurally cannot, because that page was written to describe a department, not to answer a person.
Clarity, in other words, is not the opposite of professionalism. It is a form of it. The clinician who can explain a condition in plain language is demonstrating that they understand it well enough to translate it, and the website that does the same thing inherits that trust before the patient has walked in. The jargon-first page accidentally communicates the opposite: that the practice talks about patients more comfortably than it talks to them.
How to find the words your patients actually use
You do not have to guess at the plain phrasing, and you should not, because your guess is contaminated by your training. The words are already recorded in places most practices never look. The questions patients ask at the front desk and in the exam room are the raw material — the receptionist and the medical assistant hear the real vocabulary all day. The search terms that already bring people to the site, visible in any basic analytics tool, show the exact strings that worked and hint at the ones that didn’t. Online reviews are a goldmine, because people describe their experience there in the same unguarded language they used to find you. And the auto-complete suggestions a search engine offers when you begin typing a symptom are a live feed of how the public phrases it.
Collect those phrases and they become the actual headings, the actual questions answered, the actual words on the page. The discipline is simply to write them down before the clinical instinct paraphrases them into chart language. “Ringing in the ears” stays “ringing in the ears,” with “tinnitus” alongside it — not the other way around.
This is, at bottom, a search problem as much as a communication one, and the two turn out to be the same problem. Being found by a patient and being understood by a patient are accomplished by the identical act: using their words. For a medical practice, that principle is the foundation of local SEO for doctors — the work of matching what a practice publishes to what a nearby patient actually types, so the page and the person finally meet. The language is not a decoration on top of the marketing. It is the marketing.
The same gap, everywhere
Healthcare is the sharpest case, but the lesson generalizes to any field with an inside language, which is nearly all of them. The financial advisor whose site says “tax-advantaged wealth accumulation vehicles” is invisible to the person typing “how do I save for retirement without paying so much tax.” The immigration lawyer writing “adjustment of status” loses the person searching “how do I get a green card if I’m already here.” In every case the expert’s fluency in the professional register is precisely what blinds them to the outside one, and in every case the remedy is the same: write the phrase the reader would use, put the term of art beside it, and let the two languages do their separate jobs.
The patient searching at midnight and the physician writing the note are, in the end, describing the same body and the same fear. The only thing standing between them is which words got written down. Practices that close that gap — that learn to write “heart racing” and “tachycardia” on the same line — do more than rank better. They answer the question the person actually asked, in the language they actually asked it. That is what good communication has always been, in medicine and everywhere else: meeting people in the words they already have.
About the author
Steve Bunker is the CEO of Target Patients MD, a healthcare-exclusive digital marketing agency that has worked with more than 735 medical and dental practices across the United States and Canada.