Among emergency physicians, use of the term “Sickler” is associated with negative attitudes toward people with sickle cell disease

作者：Jeffrey Glassberg, Paula Jean Tanabe, Lynne Richardson, Michael Rutledge DeBaun · 发表于：American Journal of Hematology · 年份：2013 · DOI：10.1002/ajh.23441 · 被引用次数：56 · 研究领域：Hemoglobinopathies and Related Disorders

The term "sickler" is often used by medical practitioners to refer to children and adults with a diagnosis of sickle cell disease (SCD). Although labels for patients with chronic diseases are common, (other notable terms include "CF'er" for cystic fibrosis and "asthmatic" for asthma), many people with SCD find the term offensive. Qualitative literature dating back to 1994 found that individuals consider the term a label that reduces them to nothing more than their disease 1. Despite this, use of the term "sickler" is pervasive, with internet searches for "sickler" yielding thousands of results. Electronic searches of medical literature return peer-reviewed articles about SCD that use the term in their title as recently as 2010 2. Many physicians who use the term "sickler" insist that it is not meant to be pejorative, but that it is a simple matter of efficiency ("sickler" is fewer syllables than "person with sickle cell disease"). However, results from a recent survey conducted by our group at the American College of Emergency Physicians 2011 annual meeting indicate that the use of this term may not be so innocuous, as our findings suggest that practitioners who use the term "sickler" may harbor negative attitudes toward patients with SCD. To further explore the importance of the term "sickler" and its association with attitudes and practices of emergency physicians, we administered a validated survey at the 2011 meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians. The hy...