THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR
SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times that have won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.
I’M not a professional journalist, far from it! I do all of my writing in the small amount of spare time I have.
During all of this I’ve learnt that language is such a powerful tool and in a global pandemic like this, its impact is enormous.
Sometimes I haven’t got the balance right, but I’ve put an increasing amount of attention towards my words and their impact.
You and I may be dealing with the pandemic relatively well, but it’s so important to remember that others may be dealing with their own problems and fighting their own battles.
It’s the same for all other parts of medicine too. With cancer we use so many military metaphors – fighting cancer, the enemy within, the war on cancer, precision radiotherapy. It’s been the same with Covid, “the battle against coronavirus”. I have used it from time to time and perhaps it is not the best approach.
Sometimes a hardheaded approach is required, but learning to live with the
disease is often as important as fighting it.
I do think that we should all be more mindful about the language we use, especially those in the public eye.
I’ve spoken in length before at the need for a balance between fear and caution.
We aren’t out of the woods yet, and we need to tread carefully, but at the same time regurgitating the same doomsday predictions every two weeks is so unhelpful, not to mention inaccurate.
It’s a really tricky subject and everyone is entitled to their own opinion of course, but in the public debate, I feel like we all need to be more aware of the language we use and the impact that it can have, especially on those people who are more vulnerable than others.