Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

statnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 161 posts

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#41

Post by Xenoamorphous »

Cd00d wrote: post #10
munk-a wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My SO had to seek medical attention in rural southern France (we were visiting Carcassone) - she initially sought care at the local emerg where there was not a translator available, she speaks high-school french but most of the conversation was carried out through miming and charades. A few days later, as instructed, she followed up with a local clinic where she prepared a written version of her condition and brought…

I had experience with the charades act. Got food poisoning or a stomach bug in Sofia, Bulgaria and had to act out vomiting and diarrhea at the chemists desk. Eventually they got the drift, opened a box of pills and gave me a sheet of them with no further instruction. I think I could have been successful if I knew some French, but alas, I opted for Spanish in high school. At the time it seemed Bulgarians over a certai…

> At the time it seemed Bulgarians over a certain age had French for their second (or third) language, and the younger folks had English.

Yes this happens in Spain too. People over 50 or 55 or so were taught French at school but younger people were taught English.

However don’t expect most of them to speak much of it.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#42

Post by LAC-Tech »

jka wrote: post #37
LAC-Tech wrote: post #25

Is no one going to address the elephant in the room? If you're in a country where the lingua franca is X, you need to be able to speak X or life will be difficult. I'm not sure why the onus is on every hospital to become a kind of mini united nations here.

People travel recreationally, for business, and sometimes out of necessity to places where they don't speak the local language - perhaps you, friends, or family have, or will in future, experience those kinds of travel. Medical emergencies (or, to be honest, routine medical care) can be required for anyone, anywhere, for no particular reason. Care workers are no doubt familiar with that. For people to want to improve…

People travel recreationally, for business, and sometimes out of necessity to places where they don't speak the local language - perhaps you, friends, or family have, or will in future, experience those kinds of travel.

Sure, my wifes English is very good but not perfect. I accompany her so I can give quick translations to medical terms she might not know.

If we ever bring her parents here to live, guess whose job it's going to be to make sure they understand doctors? Well, mostly hers... but you get my point. The onus is on us.

I have no expectation that every hospital should be able to communicate in every language on earth.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#43

Post by google234123 »

paxys wrote: post #34
LAC-Tech wrote: post #25

Is no one going to address the elephant in the room? If you're in a country where the lingua franca is X, you need to be able to speak X or life will be difficult. I'm not sure why the onus is on every hospital to become a kind of mini united nations here.

Tourism (including medical tourism) is a thing, as is telemedicine. In general, doctors and hospitals aren't in the business of turning away people just because they speak the "wrong" language.

To be fair, most the people only speaking Spanish in the US aren’t here for tourism.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#44

Post by atdrummond »

BaronVonSteuben wrote: post #38
atdrummond wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has become an absolute joke. I have had 6 surgeries for Crohns, a back surgery due to wear and tear from high level athletics, and am a long term sufferer of an aggressive leukaemia. Despite using opioids responsibly for over a decade, I am regarded as nothing more than a drug seeking pest the very few times I have actively sought pain relief during in-patient hospital stays. Prior to being dropped entirely from m…

Yep, absolutely. My doctor of 10+ years recently retired, leaving me in search of a new doc. I've been managing my pain for 15+ years just fine with 10mg Hydrocodone. In 15 years I only once asked to increase the dose, and it was only from two pills per day to three to help me get through the afternoon/evening better. A minuscule dose. After doing "new patient" appointments (which by the way were like $200 to $300 ea…

I don't blame the doctors either. My pain doctor was a rural boy from my hometown who made good, graduated from Berkeley and finished medical school and finished desirable postdocs at Harvard. He simply straight up quit pain management as a specialty rather than be forced to provide his patients with what he considered subpar care. The loss of doctors like him hurts particularly badly, as it leaves us with pain specialists who either knowingly ignore the decades of successfully treated patients who used opioids or the remaining (and they do still exist) pill mill operations, who have simply gotten more sophisticated in their execution. Regardless of which doctor archetype chronic pain patients end up with, they're going to suffer.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#45

Post by google234123 »

BaronVonSteuben wrote: post #38
atdrummond wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has become an absolute joke. I have had 6 surgeries for Crohns, a back surgery due to wear and tear from high level athletics, and am a long term sufferer of an aggressive leukaemia. Despite using opioids responsibly for over a decade, I am regarded as nothing more than a drug seeking pest the very few times I have actively sought pain relief during in-patient hospital stays. Prior to being dropped entirely from m…

Yep, absolutely. My doctor of 10+ years recently retired, leaving me in search of a new doc. I've been managing my pain for 15+ years just fine with 10mg Hydrocodone. In 15 years I only once asked to increase the dose, and it was only from two pills per day to three to help me get through the afternoon/evening better. A minuscule dose. After doing "new patient" appointments (which by the way were like $200 to $300 ea…

We also now know that those treatments kill people and users gain dependence and tolerance to opioids. It’s more than just protecting their medical license.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#46

Post by oblvious-earth »

kvathupo wrote: post #11
slackfan wrote: post #3

There has been a better option for a long time, called on-staff Medical Interpreters. In fact, my spouse worked as one for approximately seven years. Unfortunately due to hospitals consolidating into medical networks and cutting costs wherever they could, this went from on-staff interpreters, to contract interpreters, to on-call phone interpreters (works incredibly poorly), to google translate. Blame the beurocrats r…

What are countries with more functional healthcare systems doing differently? When it comes to comparisons with other countries, much of the dialogue in the US is centered on insurance coverage. That said, I'm curious if other countries have found better solutions to similarly fundamental issues, such as doctors working long hours, doctors being forced to maximize the number of patients, continued medical education,…

Aaron Carroll did a Youtube Series back in 2014 on the topic, even if you don't want to watch the videos there's a lot of good links in the description of each one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN-MkRcOJjY&list=PLkfBg8ML-g...

From what I remember: Insurance is one reason, Hospitals not engaging in collective bargaining (e.g. vs. NHS in England which makes decisions about what to spend money on and makes companies bid on contracts for the whole country), wasteful premium care that adds little to patient outcomes (e.g. vs Singapore which has a privatised tiered healthcare system but heavily regulates healthcare so this doesn't happen), and simply paying Doctors far more money.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#47

Post by atdrummond »

google234123 wrote: post #45
BaronVonSteuben wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, absolutely. My doctor of 10+ years recently retired, leaving me in search of a new doc. I've been managing my pain for 15+ years just fine with 10mg Hydrocodone. In 15 years I only once asked to increase the dose, and it was only from two pills per day to three to help me get through the afternoon/evening better. A minuscule dose. After doing "new patient" appointments (which by the way were like $200 to $300 ea…

We also now know that those treatments kill people and users gain dependence and tolerance to opioids. It’s more than just protecting their medical license.

The proportion of patients who become addicted from properly prescribed opioids is extremely small. The majority of addicts created were provided with opioids that were not appropriate for their particular medical situation, in doses that were too high, and on a regimen that exceeded in length what was supported by the medical evidence. The proportion of new cancer patients who go on to receive palliative care that includes opioids who end up becoming addicted has always been, and remains, in the low single digits. For patients with a genuine need and who are properly inducted and maintained on them, opioids are a powerful and useful medical tool.

Further, the bulk of use in illegal opioids stateside, such as fentanyl and its analogues, is not (at least today) driven by the conversion of the legal opioid user to an illegal drug user. Fentanyl is now commonly found in drugs that never previously would have contained an opioid, such as counterfeit benzos and MDMA. Further, the majority of fentanyl users on the street arrive at its use after consuming other illegal/street drugs. For those who started on other opioids, their first opioid will tend to be the illegally diverted pills or liquid cough treatments containing codeine/hydrocodone called "lean". Very few new users of fentanyl and fentanyl analogues come from legal opioid users, mainly because very few new users are now inducted on reckless prescriptions such as an immediate script for 180 Oxycontin and 240 benzodiazepene pills a month. Your narrative is about a decade out of date at this point.

Thomas Kline is a superb resource if you want to take a deeper dive into the actual statistics and how the narrative of a crisis was used to systematically deny law abiding patients the pain treatment they should receive. https://twitter.com/thomasklinemd

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#48

Post by anon_123g987 »

jquery wrote: post #12

Deepl is a better option. It feels several years ahead of Google Translate in quality. I know enough Japanese to hurt myself, and Deepl is definitely giving the superior translations, by far, which is great for my studies. As an analogy, it’s like going from 144p to 360p (a good human translation ranges from 720p to 4k+). Yeah 360p video is still blurry but it’s in a different league than 144p.

The problem with machine translation is not the obvious general mediocrity, but the occasional undetected catastrophic failure, especially in medical context. I don't think DeepL (or any other fully automated system) is any more reliable in this sense.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#49

Post by pythko »

atdrummond wrote: post #40

I and some others in the healthcare/healthcare tech spaces volunteered to create a discharge templating system for many of the top non-English and non-Spanish languages used in the United States - specifically the top languages in the Northwest to start. Our offering utilized data from, and would have been integrated with, an EMR whose name means "particularly impressive" even if their response was anything but. Afte…

I’m curious for more details on what your templating system was and how it worked. If you’re up for sharing, I’d love to hear about it.

I know the aforementioned EMR puts a lot of emphasis on their After Visit Summaries, which sounds somewhat similar to what you describe.

Re: Doctors who use Google Translate to talk to patients want a better option

#50

Post by missblit »

ipaddr wrote: post #20
munk-a wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My SO had to seek medical attention in rural southern France (we were visiting Carcassone) - she initially sought care at the local emerg where there was not a translator available, she speaks high-school french but most of the conversation was carried out through miming and charades. A few days later, as instructed, she followed up with a local clinic where she prepared a written version of her condition and brought…

Usually your staff comes from the local population which gives you staff members who speak the languages you would need.

Unless a recent immigrant or tourist has a medical emergency right?

Or even a longer-term immigrant who never quite learned much medical vocabulary.

Post reply on HN