81 Wild Analogies Healthcare Workers Use To Explain Medical Problems
Heart attack patient: Your heart isn’t a Lambo anymore. It’s a Honda. Hondas hate hills. But they’ll last you if you treat them right.
Patient was trying to the same amount of work as before right after.
Going to sleep is like a dishwasher.
(During sleep cerebral spinal fluid flows in and out of the brain to remove Amyloid-beta and other metabolic waste that accumulate during the day – identical to how a dishwasher fills then drains to clean your dishware. Going without sleep for extended periods is like eating off a dirty plate with rotting foodstuffs on it.)
“Water is the trash bag your kidneys use to take out the trash- are you making your kidneys work with the thin Walmart bag with the hole in the bottom, or are you giving them the good Hefty bag with the rip-stop and the odor blocker?”
When my psych patients get stuck on having several diagnoses I remind them a label is a label. If I call my cat a dog it’s still a cat and needs what it needs. You need what you need so quit focusing on a diagnosis as your identity. You’re you.
“The pancreas is like that creepy old neighbor who, if he perceives any kind of insult, no matter how small, will decide to burn the rest of the neighborhood down.”
I explain the effects of unresolved trauma to patients like playing a game of wack a mole. If you don’t address it, it starts popping up in other areas, like blood pressure, migraines, GI issues, etc.
When I explain diabetes I say “insulin is like the bouncer at a club” and with diabetes the bouncer forgot to show up to work so everyone (glucose) is waiting outside the club (the cell) and can’t get in.
And yes, now when I hear “I don’t see how you can hate from outside the club. You can’t even get in” I think of diabetes.
“A tooth root abscess is like having a big zit under your jaw bone at the root of a tooth.” Gets the point across but then I apologize for giving us both that mental image.
Urologist. I refer to different foley sizes as ranging from cocktail straw to a boba straw. If you need blood clots to come out, think of them like little boba balls…
Stem cell transplants, require heavy conditioning regimens, the patient is severely immunocompromised, lots of side effects, mucositis/stomatitis. When the white blood cells start coming up, the patient will often have a “bad” day with vomiting, diarrhea, secretions, sometimes fever etc. I always warn them and their families that WBC recovery is good, but will hit a rough patch as they try to fix everything.
I compare it to “imagine you went away for 3 weeks but didn’t realize you left a window open. Well a family of raccoons and a bunch of pigeons moved in and wrecked s**t. Stuff everywhere, holes in the walls, giant mess. You’d look around freaking out not knowing where to start and then just start cleaning chaotically. That’s how white cells feel after transplant 😂
For the cough taking forever to resolve after pneumonia: it’s like the germs threw a ticker tape parade in your lungs. The people from the parade went home, meaning the germs are dead. But there’s a huge mess in the streets for your body to clean up.
The pancreas is like the old man of the neighborhood who doesn’t want anyone in, near or around his lawn. Stones in the duct can sometimes sneak by and the old man doesn’t notice, but if he does, then everyone knows about it. He yells at the kid (stone) directly, he runs and tells his parents (liver/gallbladder) and all the other neighbors (stomach/intestines) who will listen. He ramps up and riles up the whole body and nothing can start to move past it until the old man decides to let it go…
Aspirin ≠ blood thinner
If you compare your blood to p**ping…
Aspirin is like when your p**p just slides out and there’s nothing on the paper when you wipe. Eliquis (and other blood thinners) is like diarrhea.
From 1 to 10, 10 are you sure, 10 is like a bear is pulling you apart and eating your insides while you’re still awake….. suddenly their pain level goes from 10/10 to 6/10… 🤷♀️
Fertility is like a flower. Some women are like dandelions! They can thrive in all conditions and pop up in full bloom between the cracks in the pavement. However, some (PCOS, luteal phase defect, endometriosis, etc) are more like beautiful, exotic orchids! They’re not broken or damaged; they just need the right food, light, and conditions in order to thrive and bloom 🌺
We got taught: shockable rhythms are like WiFi. What do you do when it doesn’t work properly? You reset it.
If there’s a signal but no connection? Shock.
You don’t shock a good rhythm (WiFi) that works (sinus rhythm).
You don’t shock a rhythm where the box has been turned off by the wall (can’t be reset) (asystole).
I’m a physical therapist and whenever I am trying to explain how to perform a hip hinge properly, I tell patients to imagine there is a flashlight in their a** and they are trying to shine the light on the wall behind them.
The parathyroid gland sending out PTH to ask for calcium is like a mom telling her teenage son to pick up his socks off the floor. If he does it the first time she asks, everything is good. If she has to ask a second or third time, she’s going to raise her voice. And if she keeps asking and the socks stay on the floor, she is going to scream at the next person who walks into the house and forcibly take their socks. Your parathyroid glands will steal eventually calcium from your bones.
Family doc—Explaining why cholesterol can be so high in someone who has hereditary high cholesterol (familial hyperlipidemia). It’s like you are at Costco trying to find a parking space but you just keep driving around but cannot, for the life of you, find a damn parking spot. Your lipids can’t find a place to park, so it just stays in your blood with nowhere to go.
Primary care pediatrician – I compare the start of puberty to connecting to dial up internet. Always leaves the parents laughing and the kids in disbelief as I tell them about the “olden times” where connecting to the internet took several minutes and was slow and unreliable once you connected.
When patients ask why uncontrolled blood sugar is a problem I tell them your arteries and veins are the plumbing and uncontrolled blood sugar is like pouring acid down the drain. The problem doesn’t show up right away but you are damaging the pipes. Similarly for strokes – the water pressure was too high and a pipe burst. Same happens when your blood pressure is too high.
Explaining leukemia to my peds onc families: Your bone marrow is a factory. Usually, all of the different workers are there in the right amounts and they all do their jobs and get along. Leukemia is when one of those workers goes rogue and then convinces all of his friends to go rogue. So now you have WAY too many of one kind of worker, and not only that, none of them do their job right AND there’s so many of them that none of the other workers can come to work anymore.
Then, for the first month of treatment, we work to empty out the entire factory so hopefully we can hire a whole new work force that doesn’t go rogue. And the rest of therapy is to help ensure those rogue workers don’t sneakily come back.
Psych NP: having ADHD is like trying to juggle all your thoughts at once, and some of the balls just disappear, and some fall and try to roll away, so then you chase after the rolling ball and the other balls fall and roll away out of sight.
Dehydration is bad for kidneys. You know engines ( old guys nod their heads). Well….what happens when engines run out of oil ( old guys make a face and grimace). Exactly!!! Stay hydrated!
I explain CRPS as “the angry alcoholic in the house”. Outside looking in, the house looks fine, but once you look in the house, the nerves are PISSED.
Helps for patients to understand that I see and believe their pain. And I can explain that there is nothing “structurally” wrong with their hand. It’s their nerves giving them wayyyy too much information.
When someone has had a heart attack. “You’ve turned your 6 lane interstate into a bicycle lane”
For lung disease – Prednisone is the girl you want to date but never marry.
Imagine your ureters like a piece of cooked spaghetti. Now imagine a jagged marble or small lego making its way thru there! That my friends is a kidney stone.
Depression: Imagine you are walking around with a motorcycle helmet on all the time. You can still make contact with the world, but it takes so much more effort because there is something between you and the rest of the world that interferes.
Referring to a c-section birth as coming out the sun roof🤷🏼♀️
Explained that vaccines are the leaked classified documents your immune system uses to prepare for battle against invaders.
To my new autoimmune patients: “your immune system is like a camp fire, it’s a super helpful tool for cooking breakfast when we go camping. A normal person’s camp fire is just the right size for their breakfast. Your camp fire is more like a forest fire.”
I’m a dentist and these are a couple phrases I use regularly:
Wearing new dentures is like breaking in new shoes.
A root canal is like looking into a tooth’s soul.
Providing breastfeeding support for first time parents I explain how you have to help roll the breast deep into baby’s mouth, like trying to take a big bite from a double-double.
Usually dad has a light bulb moment.
As a hospice nurse, explaining how to use meds at end of life, as many are afraid of giving them. If the caretaker has kids, I would ask if they had an epidural and explain “you know how labor can sometimes feel like it’s not progressing, and you’re ready but also scared, and everything is tense? And then they come give you that medicine and it blocks the pain and the anxiety of what’s next starts to go away, and your body does exactly what it was going to do naturally, but with less pain.”
Atrial fibrillation – rowing boat without a coxswain to coordinate the rowers, the boat still moves but its not as efficient and the water will be more turbulent.
Adrenal insufficiency due to exogenous steroids – the domestic factories shut down because the market is flooded with imported goods, once it’s mothballed it’s really hard to get local production going to meet demand again.
My husband works on Pixis machines. 9 times out of 10, he explains to anyone unaware of what that is as a ‘vending machine for drugs’. I get a kick out of it every time. Especially because he phrases himself as a ‘legal drug dealer’ (Pharmacy technician).
Okay I am not a healthcare professional but I will never forget my grandfather’s urologist going on for a full seven minutes about how his prostate was like the defensive line of a football team and his urine was a running back.
Also I cannot emphasize enough that my grandfather & I did not care about football or know much about it. & also we were already VERY clear on what the issue was prior to the analogy lol
When explaining to my MOUD patients that I won’t abandon them if they relapse I compare it to diabetes. If my diabetic patients binge on donuts and sodas one weekend, I don’t cut off their insulin. It’s the same thing.
(Not a doctor; but what one said when I was 2 stuck with me!)
*my brother was born without his left ventricle – HLHS*
“What would you want to do if your car was missing part of the engine? Try & fix it continuously? Or get a new engine?”
(Norwood vs. Heart Transplant)
He had a heart transplant 😊
And now it’s encouraged for doctors to try & get people to do the Norwood so that they can keep coming back for repairs 💰
Thanks Dr. Boucek, for keeping it real.
The human body is really good at surviving big things, like a shark bite. It clamps down vessels, it clots blood.
But, when we do surgery, your body thinks: aaahhh! Shark bite! And tries to respond the same way.
Problem is, we don’t need all that clotting and clamping. So, we give you anticoagulants and get you up and moving so you don’t make clots where we don’t need them. BC if one of those clots is in a lung or the brain, that’s bad.
Not a healthcare professional but my surgical oncologist described my then-upcoming mastectomy as “like scooping the inside of a pumpkin out of the shell” which was quite a visual…
Not a doctor but I have ITP and I love explaining it to people with “macrophages are like the sanitation workers of my body. They take anything labeled ‘trash’ and clean up broken cells and stuff. Unfortunately, someone left the label maker in the hands of the colorblind raccoon that is my immune system, and it keeps labeling my platelets as trash. The immune system says ‘take those out or you’re fired’ and they have no choice but to do it.”
Regarding my struggles with talk therapy and my desire to move to a more intensive therapy (probably EMDR): “I can pull off all the leaves (coping skills) and spray all the roundup (meds), but the dandelion (symptoms) isn’t gonna stop coming back and spreading until I deal with the whole root (trauma).”
I’m an electrologist (permanent hair removal specialist for both cosmetic and medical related hair removal)
I explain that hairs growing in our body is like children in school (grades k-12) and the hairs showing above the surface of the skin are the 12th graders. Once the 12th graders graduate (shed from the body) they return to kindergarten and must work their way up to 12th grade again before we see them. They will repeat this cycle unless we “permanently” graduate them with electrolysis 🤪☠️
-Flu vaccine is like a bulletproof vest in a war zone
-Insulin is the key that allows glucose into your cells. T1D is when you don’t have any more keys. T2D is when the lock wears out.
Fibromyalgia is like when you go the gym for the first time and do a really heavy workout and then everytime you move the following day your muscles scream at you – except you never did the work out and your muscles are still screaming.
I teach heart blocks using a romantic couple:
Normal sinus rhythm: they’re newlyweds, and he (PR interval) comes home to her (qrs) same time after work every night
2nd degree type 1: They’ve been married a few years, and he stops for a beer after work each night, staying out later and later until he doesn’t come home one night. Then he’s sorry, they make up, and it starts all over.
2nd degree type 2: they’re in counseling, so he makes an effort to come home at the same time every night but occasionally stays out all night randomly. Third degree: they’re divorced and have no relation to each other. I swap who goes out for a beer each time I teach it so no one is always the villain lol.
As an RN I describe the diabetic damage of hyperglycemia as “the sugar crystals in your blood are sharp and cutting and that’s how it causes micro damage”…..it’s actually what happens. It def gets people’s attention.
The yearly flu shot. Our white blood cells are like our army to k**l off “the bad guys.” Every year, the bad guys wear a new disguise. When we get our booster shots, we are sending in some new fighters with a picture of how the bad guy looks now.
ER nurse. Afib is like trying to bail out a flooded boat too fast. It’s not efficiently filling the bucket and just splashing around. Control the speed, fill the bucket properly, things are much more efficient even if it’s slower.
L&D RN: It’s totally normal your babies hands and feet are kinda blue. In the womb they are a mermaid, swimming around and you help them deliver oxygen. After we cut the umbilical cord the babies heart has to start delivering oxygenated blood and it take a while for the end of the limbs to catch up.
Breast Sonographer- trying to position patient to scan left breast- (turn on your right side, put your left arm over your head) Do your best Rose from Titanic.
Dental hygienist here! 👋🏻 “The advanced oral cancer screening is like a rave. Everyone should be glowing under the black light. The weird looking guy NOT raving & glowing is the problem and needs to be checked out.” 🦷
FM here. When describing panic attacks: our bodies were designed a long time ago to be able to run from bears – heart races, breathing increases, revved up which is all important to be able to have oxygen for our muscles to outrun the bear. Our stress now isn’t a bear – but we are still wired the same way.
When a patient is on an insulin drip they assume turning it up will get them out of DKA faster. I always say, “turning the oven on high isn’t going to cook my pizza faster, it’s just going to be burnt.” When explaining the effects of DKA on electrolytes and such.
Oh! And cardiac bypass takes a tiny little country road with a downed tree and builds a new interstate.
“I want you to think of your body as a large trash bag containing a series of smaller but really important trash bags.”
Dietitian. When I explain how you stop feeling hungry when you always skip meals I explain it as “you know when you have that one friend that you keep inviting out but they keep saying no, so you stop inviting them? It’s the same thing and your body stopped telling you it’s hungry because you ignored it. Now please stop ignoring it.”
I’ve been known to describe my immune system as a hyperactive 4 year old…it sometimes gets bored and starts breaking things it shouldn’t.
My psychiatrist described the placebo effect as: “What would you do if I told you not to think about the pink elephant in the room? You’re going to think about the elephant in the room.”
The v**ina is a self cleaning oven.
Calling your vulva your v**ina is like calling your throat your face.
The uterus is like a lightbulb – the cervix is the screw in portion of the light bulb. 💡
My spinal cord stimulator rep explained to me how over stimulation from the device works using ✨spirit fingers✨ to demonstrate. It was actually really useful.
Primary Care here and so many people gloss over basic bodily needs like they’re optional: if you want to feel amazing like a little red Porsche, you have to act like you’re a little red Porsche. You can’t put in 3 liters of oil when it requires 5. You can’t put in cheap E-10 unleaded and expect performance. You have to air up the tires. Flush the transmission. Rev the engine on occasion. Otherwise you’re gonna drive the 88 beige Camry that just hums along forever.
Not a medical professional, but medical Mom (we’ve heard SO much):
My son’s soft spot didn’t close up for almost 3 years. Go to neurosurgeon. He says it’s fine, it’ll remedy in time. “A spike falling from the sky would be problematic, but a spike falling from the sky would be problematic for any of us.”
Orthostatic hypotension explain with water pressure and pipe size to my construciton patients🤷🏽♂️
PT here. Scar tissue is like spackle mending a hole in your wall. If you don’t sand (stress) it and paint it, it’s going to be ugly and not function well. And no matter how good of a job you do it’s not going to be a singular piece of Sheetrock again. But we can get it close. But the spackle is not bad. It’s necessary to heal.
The bladder is a muscle and takes a while to “warm up” (aka why men have trouble urinating overnight). Imaging asking your leg muscles to run a sprint at 2am vs 2pm.
I once described a patients congested lungs like a dirty pot, and his saline nebs like the soak that you need to get all the crud off of it.
When someone isn’t doing effective chest compressions, “Pound on their chest like they owe you child support.” Does the trick every time.
When replacing lots of K and we give some bonus mag. Pt: is my mag low? Well, no. But is it easy to eat a tub of peanut butter? No. You need jelly to help get it all down. Mag is the jelly.
In regards to hyponatremia: imagine if all of your cells are orbeez. orbeez stop absorbing water once they reach their limit. your cells don’t, instead they break apart like when you squish a full orbee.
You have to hold babies like a microscope (like they taught you in high school!) by the “base” (butt) and neck!! It clicks for a shocking amount of people.
