Objective: Nowadays, patient-centered medical care is essential.  It is very important to use layman’s terms that patients can understand. However, most medical staff tend to use difficult medical terms.  The purpose of this study was to investigate the amount of difficult medical terms in briefing papers given to patients.
Methods: We conducted a questionnaire survey on September 21, 2012 of 246 non-medical professionals in order to identify difficult medical terms used in a manual for handling disorders due to adverse drug reactions.
Result: It was found that there were 387 terms of those in the manual (n=980) that non-medical professionals had never seen or heard before (39.5%).  There were 128 terms for which they could not correctly replace Japanese kana (phonetic) characters with kanji (pictorial) characters (13.1%).
Conclusion: The results indicate that the manual has many terms that are difficult for non-medical professionals to understand.  This may hinder patients’ comprehension.  These difficult medical terms need to be replaced with layman’s terms.