The longer I work, the fewer words I trust.
Not because language doesn't matter - but because it matters too much to be lazy with it.
There are a few words I've quietly retired. Not because they're wrong. Because they're too convenient.
Take 'world class'.
It reassures people who can't easily judge quality. It signals a peak of seriousness to peers.
The only snag is there's no world league table. No judges. No relegation zone. Just a lot of confident claims floating around.
Then there's 'complex'.
Sometimes a case genuinely has moving parts. More often, the word appears when progress hasn't been linear or predictable.
Used carefully, it's a description. Used lazily, it becomes cover.
To someone searching for answers, complex doesn't land as neutral. It carries an implication: we'll see what others missed.
That implication does a lot of commercial work, quietly - maybe even deliberately.
Words don't just sell reassurance. They start to shape how clinicians think and act. And once that happens, outcomes aren't accidental.
They're earned - or they're not.
When language gets bigger, justification often gets smaller.