Skip to content
Sign in

Who the report was written for, and why that makes it hard to read

Before anything else: the difficulty is the document, not you.

Lesson 1 of 4

9 min Text

What this lesson says

  • A report is written by one clinician for the clinician who ordered it
  • It describes findings; it is usually not a diagnosis and often not an interpretation
  • A radiologist reporting a scan has not examined you and does not have your history
  • An impression or conclusion line is the nearest thing to a summary
  • Reading a report without the person who ordered it is reading half a conversation

This is general education. It is not advice about your own situation, and it does not replace seeing a clinician.

Written lesson.
  1. 1. A lab or imaging report is a message from one clinician to another. It is written in a shared technical shorthand, to be read alongside the history, the examination and the reason the test was ordered — none of which are in the document. So the reason it is hard to read is not that you lack the vocabulary. It is that you are reading the second half of a conversation whose first half is not written down.
  2. 2. That has a practical consequence worth holding on to. A radiologist who reports your scan has generally not met you, not examined you, and not been told everything your own clinician knows. The report describes what the pictures show. What it means for you is a separate judgement, made by somebody with the rest of the information.
  3. 3. Most reports have a shape. A section saying what was done and how. A body listing findings, organ by organ or value by value, including a great many that are entirely normal and are recorded so that the next person knows they were looked at. And then an impression, conclusion or comment line, which is the reporter's summary and the closest the document comes to saying what it thinks.
  4. 4. If you read nothing else, read that last line — and then notice how carefully it is usually worded. Phrases like suggestive of, cannot be excluded, correlate clinically and recommend follow-up are not hedging for its own sake. They are the reporter saying, precisely, that the pictures narrow things down without settling them.
  5. 5. The rest of this course is about the two things that frighten people most: a number outside a printed range, and a word on an ultrasound report that sounds like a disease. Neither is a diagnosis on its own.

All lessons in this course

  1. 1 Who the report was written for, and why that makes it hard to read 9 min Reading now
  2. 2 Reference ranges, flags, and why outside the range is not a verdict 11 min
  3. 3 Reading a pelvic ultrasound report without frightening yourself 12 min
  4. 4 What to ask, what to keep, and what not to do with a report 10 min

No lesson is locked. Ticks appear once you have an account, so that what you have read is yours and not this device's.