The American Medical Association has just released “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts“. This 54-page document calls upon doctors to supplement medical prose with explanations of the social dysfunction which underlie “marginalization and inequity due to sexism, class oppression, homophobia, xenophobia and ableism”.

The Grumpy Economist (a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford) complained about the new rules.

“I found this document interesting, among other reasons, because I thought I already spoke woke. I thought the left-hand column was already the Proper Terminology. They are, after all, already in the mandatory passive voice. How wrong I was! How many more mouthfuls of word salad it is going to take to get through a sentence. Or … last point, to get an article accepted in a medical journal.”

In its explanation of the reasons for revising medical discourse, the AMA explains that “in all cases, pursuing equity requires disavowing words that are rooted in systems of power that reinforce discrimination and exclusion.”

So … please use Black instead of black; historically and intentionally excluded instead of disadvantaged; equity instead of equality; persons with a history of incarceration instead of felon; historically marginalized instead of minority, social injustice instead of social problem; and so on.

This tends to raise the word count as the following table demonstrates: