The medical community needs more emojis |
The medical community needs more emojis, according to Chuhan Hee, an ambulance that helped recommend heart-lung emojis.
Doctors are calling for more health symbols that they believe can improve communication between doctors and patients.
In recent years, medical and health emojis such as stethoscopes, hearing aids, bones, and germs have been added to the Unicode standard.
In a comment posted to JAMA last week, Ambulance and its co-authors hope that the Unicode standard will approve more symbols that can be used in the medical environment, including symbols for more organs such as stomach, liver, intestines, equipment and CT scans.
He also hopes that more health professionals will promote these codes and set standards for their use in medical communications.
Emergency physicians say patients who say certain words are more likely to have certain conditions. We keep asking people what pain they are feeling and these are symbols that can be represented graphically, not verbally communicated.
He added that emoji-like images are widely used in medicine. One end of the Wong-Baker pain scale is a smiling face and the other end is a cold or crying face to indicate the degree of pain.
The ladder was originally designed for children. But today it is used in many doctors' offices and hospitals to care for patients of all ages.
If smiling faces are part of medical communication, why not use consistent visual language on people's phones as well?
The medical community needs more emojis
Emergency physicians have a number of uses for symbols in medicine. Patients who do not speak or understand English can use it to describe their symptoms.
For patients who speak English but have not provided much education about their health, common and standardized pictures can make it easier for them to understand and follow treatment instructions.
The advent of telemedicine also provides more opportunities for medical staff to add visibility to their communications.
Emojination is an organization that promotes more inclusive emoji. She helped provide many symbol suggestions, including medical symbols such as stethoscopes, blood drops, X-rays, and plaster.
Doctors believe that adding more symbols to major organs is beneficial. Although the symbols for the brain, anatomical heart, and lungs are accepted, other organs are difficult to obtain. This is because they do not have much demand.
It seems like emojis shouldn't be a top priority in the medical field. But anything that improves doctor-patient communication is worth a try.