A part of what makes experience in medical profession so valuable, is that the experienced doctors can often effectively see a lot of clues just by looking at us and observing our behavior, not just listening to what we have to say to them. One of the clues for sure is our language. People in different psychosomatic states will use different vocabulary, style, and sentence structures. I, for example, tend to use shorter sentences when in strong pain, on average.

Why not automate this? Imagine the savings. Instead of asking people how they are, we can kind of see it in their MyChart messages. It turns out though that a liver failure will actually lengthen your sentences!

“For patients with the highest MELD scores, we found that their messages had fewer letters per word, fewer words of six letters or more, and more words per sentence before their transplants,” said study co-author and computational linguist Masoud Rouhizadeh, MSc, PhD, one of the NLP leads at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research and co-founder of its Center for Clinical NLP.

If this research direction proves useful, imagine the possibilities! You’d send a text message instead of these annoying blood tests. An MRI would be replaced by submitting an essay. And your liver transplant would be decided based on how well you delivered your punchline.

This is not medical advice, but meanwhile just to be sure I’ll avoid rare words in my MyChart messages, to prevent being misdiagnosed with a rare disease.