Idiopathic

Med school is said to expand your vocabulary by hundreds of thousands of new terms. A liturgy of pentasyllabic words of exact or debatable meaning infest your mind, rolling off the tongue nearly effortlessly. Half utility, half status symbol, medical jargon allows us to communicate efficiently and above the heads of our patients, allowing clear categorization in a language limited to those of the elite set.

For the most part, this lingual expansion is actually far more useful than it sounds. The ability to distinguish between an adenocarcinoma and a small cell carcinoma (both two common lung cancers) exists in years of life expectancy. The concepts that we so interestingly name provide us with a way to communicate paragraphs of detail in one sentence, a must for the hectic and high information density world of medical practice.

However this expanded lexicon has its breakdowns. The worst of these is the catch-all word we use to indicate our ignorance. Idiopathic. The word literally means unknown cause. We define a myriad of disease this way, lumping together symptoms whose cause we cannot discern into common pools of generic identity. We have this dominant need to categorize, a need to diagnose even when we have nothing specific to claim. It is the great psychosis of modern medicine, this idea that we have to figure everything out. Idiopathic is the safety blanket, the margin that allows us to maintain our sanity in the face of a world in which there are still innumerable diseases we can only identify by symptoms, if even that.

It is a striking thing to learn, a gaping hole in the midst of a torrent of hard factual data. We are so focused on finding truth, finding answers, that we created a word defined by being undefinable.