Explaining to the ‘layscape’

If, like me, you’re a health care professional in 2020, you tend to keep track of coronavirus news, as we have now become the interpreters and disseminators of changing information about the crisis, a role we play in varying scales—either to friends and families, or to larger audiences like Facebook followings or national broadsheets.

Information is everything: How it’s disseminated, how accurate it is, how the public interprets it, how the government modifies policy accordingly. It can spell the difference between relative safety and absolute disaster. I do not envy the roles of prominent health experts, who do have the capacity to interpret their knowledge for consumption of a greater public, but who are always under scrutiny, and who are not immune to being politicized or attacked.

I wanted to talk a little about “laysplaining,” a word which has made the rounds on social media recently, after infectious disease expert Dr. Edsel Salvaña wrote about it in a now-viral Facebook post. It is a fairly new word, and curiously enough, one of its first uses appears to have been in a mathematics dissertation, with the author carefully and gently “laysplaining” complex mathematical concepts to a lay audience. Now the word has come to be a pejorative term for behavior on the part of laypersons to correct, comment on, or explain a concept to a professional or an expert on the topic in question—it’s a close, no less annoying, cousin of the word “mansplaining.” Laysplaining can happen in any field, but the field of medicine takes centerstage during the pandemic, where laysplaining behavior, and the response to it, can help shape outcomes and affect the spread of lifesaving information.

Chances are, any health care worker reading this has been “laysplained” to before, and it hasn’t been pretty. Immediately coming to mind are persons laysplaining to emergency room nurses and triage officers why they should be getting first priority. Most times it behooves us to be silent and polite; but in the public arena of the internet, and while in the middle of a pandemic, we do feel the responsibility to correct dangerous information. There are antivaxxers debating with physicians and scientists about the evidence behind vaccines; there are antimaskers lecturing the general public about how the coronavirus is “just a flu” and that the global pandemic response is one big, conspiracy-driven scare tactic. In such circumstances to stay silent is not a great option, since we live in a society that has steadily grown not just to mistrust experts, but to mistrust science itself, at the cost of actual lives.

As I mentioned in a previous column, research has suggested that anti-vaccine, anti-mask groups can easily engage those who are “undecided” or still searching for information. To combat this, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is at the center of the coronavirus response in the United States and whose work is recognized and respected by our local physicians, has encouraged scientific communicators to try to build trust in their audiences, by readily explaining what we know, what we don’t know, and what we should do. A nonhostile, approachable, easily accessible, and easily understood knowledge source is probably one’s best bet against the tide of anti-scientific propaganda. In this, equipped health professionals have a special, important role to play online and offline. But these individuals are also human—affected by trolling and by hate speech; exhausted by work in health care in real life, compounded with working to combat misinformation online; exhausted, like the rest of us, by the pandemic.

I would like to use this space to thank health professionals out there who, despite limitations, are working toward that older definition of laysplaining—to carefully explain concepts such that laypersons can understand them, to build trust with audiences, to spur others on to be part of this joint battle against the coronavirus. Thanks are due to those creating news briefs, mnemonics, infographics, videos, songs to help people manage and process information about the coronavirus. For instance, Doctors Without Borders has come out with a printable coloring and activity book for children on “What Can You Do About COVID-19?” This work to educate—to explain to the “layscape,” even to children—is done every day, often unseen, often confined to conversations with family members and to comments sections in private social media accounts. In a setting where people’s understanding of scientific concepts can be hampered by limited education and poor access to information, it has become especially important to recognize the layperson as an ally and an equal in the coronavirus fight.

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