Abnormalities of Life

My firm recently collaborated with another to pull off a major presentation for a large healthcare client. When our forces first convened two weeks ago, the primary rep from the other firm (herein known as "Buck") tried to talk about evidence-based design. Evidence-based design is basically a nation-wide grass-roots effort that hospitals are making to emphasize hospitality within a hospital setting. It primarily emphasizes the positive impact that the built environment can have on patient healing, safety and overall satisfaction. There is a lot of evidence to support these findings, but because so much is still so new, some old-school folks have not bought into it yet.

Buck argued with our folks over whether evidence-based design was really worth mentioning in the presentation. The graphic that he developed for this discussed that so much evidence is just anecdotal right now and not empirical. It was a convincing argument, except that it was the difference between empirical and antidotal findings. According to Webster, there is no way that antidotal is used correctly in this instance. I'm a firm believer that if you don't know how to use a word, don't use it. Especially when using medical technology around clinicians. No matter how hard we convinced Buck that his word usage was improper, he insisted on using it.

Luckily the slide, and all that it inferred, was deleted in the 11th hour, stopping the grammar gods in their tracks. . . until. . .

At the presentation, when opened up to the floor, a question was asked about how to gain consensus among two groups that do not work together. The person continued in saying "sometimes aside from an unfamiliarity, these groups can often be likened to the Sunnis and Shiites".

In response to the question, Buck started with "well, I know things between Sunny and Cher were awful, but. . . ".

WHAT!? He was dead serious too. There are no words.

I append my previous statement. If you don't know what it means, don't crack a joke about it.