Patient: from the Latin root pati to 'Suffer'.
- bearing pains or trials calmly or without complaint
Client: from the Latin root cliens to 'Lean'.
- a person who engages the professional advice or services of another
What do you call the people you treat? What SHOULD we call the people we treat?
Great Question
A quick search on Wikipedia gave these results:
Patient - Anyone recieving medical attention, Care or Treatment.
Client (not as easily defined) - Used informally to describe any customer of a given service or product business.
Personally I would rather be a "patient" than a "client" when visiting a health care practitioner, weather it be a Medical Doctor, Massage therapist or Chinese Medicine practitioner.
I don't like either.
but I don't like the awkward pretention of inventing new terminology.
So I have gone with patient over client because far and away, I consider my relationship with my 'patients' to be a medical one more than a business one. 'Client' makes me queasy. I am not selling them widgets. They are coming to me for my expertise in medical care.
Daniel Schulman
Charlottetown, PEI, Canada
