When Alan Alda speaks to doctors about communicating with their patients, he doesn’t start off by saying “When you talk to a patient, try not to use jargon.”  Instead, he tells them a story about his appendix operation. When Alda was in Chile filming a documentary, he suffered a life-threatening problem with his appendix.  He needed an end-to-end anastomosis.  This meant a yard of Alda’s intestine had to be cut out.  Before surgery, his operating doctor told him that something had gone wrong with Alda’s […]