Health and food are linked, but they could be more so. An English doctor suggests making analogies between foods and illnesses, to help patients better understand their pathologies.
Doctors should use analogies between illnesses and the appearance of certain foods to better explain their conditions to patients. An English doctor, Doctor Ritu Lakhtakia, would like to see this method spread, to facilitate future diagnoses. According to him, using food metaphors to describe little ailments and big ailments isn’t particularly elegant, but it can be very useful.
Certain expressions have passed into everyday language without being thought about, but they describe medical cases very well. This is the case, for example, with the famous “beer belly”, used to describe very round bellies, or even obesity. The same goes for the wine stain, the nickname for “angiomas”. The expression is well illustrated and perfectly characterizes the red mark caused by the malformation of small blood vessels, at a specific location on the skin. Finally, alcoholic beverages have medical benefits …
Croissants, blueberries, anchovies
And for lesser-known pathologies with complicated names, the culinary analogy might be even more necessary.
For example, a schwannoma, this non-cancerous tumor located in the peripheral nerves, can thus be detected by a patient if he knows that it “looks like a crescent”. Congenital rubella, which a baby can develop if the mother has rubella in the first three months of pregnancy, can be identified by nodules similar to blueberry muffins. Doctors will be able to explain amoebic abscesses in the liver by comparing them to “anchovy sauce”.
Not very appetizing, Dr. Lakhtakia himself agrees, but it is a useful method to make complex illnesses accessible and recognizable to everyone.
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