Combating the destructive biomedicalisation of clinical language

Fit for the future?For most clinicians, much of Wes Streeting’s 10 year plan for the NHS in England, Fit for the Future,1 is written in an alienating bureaucratic and technocratic language.The word counts in the July 2025 report are instructive2: “genome” (17), “genomics” (51), “digital” (122), and “AI” (107); versus “continuity” (4), “suffer/ing” (7), “comfort” (1), “kindness” (0), and “solidarity” (2). The conquering rhetoric of risk and prevention far outweighs any exploration of the language of illness and disease, of fear and hope, that is the reality of the consulting room. And, despite the power of evidence supporting Vincent Felitti’s pyramid of adverse child experiences,3 the word counts for “poverty” (9) and “violence” (2) in Streeting’s report are minimal.The apotheosis of this technocratic language arrived with the headline grabbing proposal to subject all newborns in England to genetic sequencing. Trevor Sheldon and John Wright responded in The BMJ,4 “Population genetic…