Global perspectives on patients

Competition time

Scattered on these two pages are seven words for “patient.” On the next two pages are seven languages. Match up the right words to the right languages and you could win £50 ($80; ¤70) of amazon.com vouchers. Web readers: it's not easy to scatter words on the web so they are collected here in a box.

1. mareese

2. pacient

3. paciente

4. rogi

5. bolnavi

6. pacijent

7. onye oya

1. Hindi, the national language of India

2. Bengali, a language of eastern india

3. Romanian

4. less commonly used Romanian, literally “ill men”

5. Bosnian

6. Igbo, one of 250 languages used in Nigeria, literally “sick person”

7. Spanish

Email studenteditor@bmj.com with your answers (such as paciente is Spanish, so the answer would be C7), and your name, year of study, University and country by 24 July. We'll pick three winners at random from all those with the right answers and let you know who has won in September's journal.

Mexico

Mexico is a country full of differences. In Mexico, we think of three different health groups--the wealthy, the worker with just enough money to live on, and the deprived. Differences between these groups are huge, in terms of how they communicate and the treatment they receive. Recently, litigation has changed things, and doctors feel a lot of pressure dealing with information and probabilities.

Communication between doctors and patients depends entirely on what the doctor thinks patients want. How doctors inform their patients about their illnesses varies between doctors and families; education, religion, and traditions affect the way people communicate. Patients' relatives often want to keep things secret, and ask the doctor not to reveal the truth. This is common in elderly people and people with terminal diseases. People that …