Objectives: The purpose of this study was to clarify the gaps in the recognition of medical terms mainly related to medicines between laypeople and medical practitioners in order to contribute to improving risk communication in the medical care field.
Method: A total of 315 laypeople and 211 doctors were surveyed. To examine the gaps between them, we adopted 57 medical terms from the National Institute for Japanese Language and further added 33 medical terms. In total, 90 medical terms were used.
Results: For the medical terms group into the “Expressed in other words of vernacular speech”, the recognition by the laypeople was low and that estimated by the practitioners was high. For the newly added medical terms groups into the clinical-trial-related terms and medical terms related to side effects, the recognition by the laypeople was lower than that estimated by the practitioners. Moreover, the recognition values for above two groups were smaller than the other groups.
Conclusions: The gaps between the basic recognition of the medical terms by laypeople and that estimated by the practitioners suggest that the possibility that patients cannot recognize much more difficult terms should be considered.