Talk:担当医

RFD discussion: August 2019–July 2020

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担当医

Recent addition by a new editor who's still learning the ropes. Looks awfully SOP to me, as 担当 (tantō, “in charge”) + 医 (i, “doctor”, short form of modern 医者 (isha)). ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:01, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

Keep, this is a specific concept/title. The definition at the moment is not quite correct, and the entry needs to explain how it is (subtly) different from 主治医. This word sometimes corresponds to Chinese 主治醫, sometimes to 住院醫. Wyang (talk) 11:58, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

Hmm, thanks for the feedback. I note that 主治 (shuji) as a modifier has a general sense of "primary care", whereas 担当 (tantō) is more like "in charge at the moment, currently assigned". In the context of Japanese workplaces, tantō is used all the time to mean "someone who is currently on-point or responsible for something", wholly separate from job titles.

I also note that various Japanese dictionaries include an entry for 主治医 (shuji-i, Kotobank page, showing entries from four references), but not for 担当医 (tantō-i, Kotobank, showing no such page). I also see the presence of other tantō + abbreviated job titles that seem similarly SOP-ish, further suggesting the productivity of this construction: google:"担当技" "は", where 技 (gi) appears to be short for 技術者 (gijutsusha, “engineer”), or google:"担当監" "は", where 監 (kan) appears to be short for 監督 (kantoku, “supervision; supervisor”).

I agree that 担当医 (tantō-i) is a separate concept from 主治医 (shuji-i). From what I've seen so far, though, it looks like the former is not a single lexicalized unit, so much as two terms put together in a flexible compound. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:33, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

担当 means "being in charge of some area of responsibility". So it would be reasonable to assume that a 担当医 is a doctor who is in charge of some area of responsibility. That's a bit vague: it could be any sort of area of responsibility. But 担当医 has a more specific meaning according to Kenkyusha Online Dictionary: the 「doctor [physician] in charge of [looking after, dealing with, seeing] one [sb]. I think it's helpful to include an entry for it, since this sense isn't obvious from the components of the word. Richwarm88 (talk) 09:44, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

I think the vagueness is actually part of the term -- what the doctor is 担当 (tantō, “in charge”) of is dependent on context.

For example, I find a few instances of google:"部門の担当医", "doctor in charge of the department", or google:"内科の担当医" "doctor in charge of internal medicine", or google:"外科の担当医" "doctor in charge of surgery". Usage also makes it clear that this 担当 (tantō, “in charge”) status is a matter of currently assigned responsibility, and not job title, as we'd expect from use of the 担当 (tantō, “in charge”) term.

In the context of a visit to a hospital and multiple different areas of medicine, you'd have your 主治医 (shuji-i, “primary care physician”) coordinating and referring, and you'd potentially then have a 担当医 (tantō-i, “doctor in charge”) as the doctor that happened to see you in each specialty. And then in the separate context of each specialty as a subset of the organizational structure of the hospital, each specialty might have someone assigned as 担当医 (tantō-i, “doctor in charge”) for that shift -- not in charge of your individual care, but rather as the on-duty head.

Given the apparent fluidity of meaning, which would be consistent with this as a non-lexicalized phrase, I'm not convinced it merits an entry. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:45, 10 September 2019 (UTC)

The sort of usage you describe (担当医 as the doctor in charge of some specialty) probably doesn't merit an entry. But there's also the meaning defined in the Kenkyusha Online Dictionary entry that I quoted: the doctor in charge of looking after somebody. It's also the meaning given in JMDict as "one's doctor". And, given that Wyang wrote that 担当医 (sometimes) corresponds to Chinese 主治醫 (physician in charge of the case or patient), I'd say it's a meaning that he too had in mind. Here are some examples where 担当医 has the meaning described in the Kenkyusha definition:

1. 胸の辺りに「違和感」があり、階段の昇り降りに息が切れる。さすがに、危機感を強めた私は、GPの予約を取ることにした。... GP（ジェネラル・プラクティショナー）とは、私の担当医のこと。英国の制度では、自分をまず特定の担当医に登録し、どんな病気においても、まずはその担当医に相談することになる。 [1]
2. 緒方 安雄（おがた やすお、1898年（明治31年） - 1989年（平成元年）5月22日）は、日本の小児科医。... 1937年東宮侍医となり、現天皇の幼時まで担当医となる。[2]
3. それは悪い医者にあたりましたね。。 私の担当医は休日なのに飛んできて、物凄い貴重だ！[3]
4. 担当医が、ご結婚され4月で退職し ... 今後はまだ顔も名前も知らない方が担当医になるって… [4] Richwarm88 (talk) 21:42, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

• @Richwarm88, thank you for the quotes. #1 is definitely a lexical usage, where the author is clearly using 担当医 to refer to "one's general practitioner", essentially as a synonym for 主治医. The usage in #2 is more ambiguous, and I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable in the functioning of the court as an organization to be able to suss out how 担当医 is being used here without more context. #3 is probably a case of 担当医 = "general practitioner", but again we lack much context. And #4 includes substantially more context and does appear to be using 担当医 with a "GP" sense.

In light of these findings, I think the evidence is growing that 担当医 has at least this one additional idiomatic sense, as a synonym for 主治医. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:50, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

@Eirikr, I agree with what you wrote. Regarding #2, I showed the Wikipedia paragraph to someone* and asked "In [that] paragraph, what does 担当医 mean exactly?" She emailed back that it means that "he was the doctor in charge of the current emperor's health and periodical health checks, etc." ("current emperor" in this case meaning Naruhito – when he was a baby). This is pretty much the sort of answer I expected. By the way, as the Wikipedia article mentions, Dr Ogata was a pediatrician, not a GP. *(My informant is a lecturer in Japanese language, a native speaker who has a PhD in applied linguistics.) Richwarm88 (talk) 06:06, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

By the way, the Wiktionary definition for 担当 says it means "charge of, end, responsibility for an area of work". Do you know which sense of "end" is intended here? I can't figure it out. Richwarm88 (talk) 06:29, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

• @Richwarm88, it looks like @Haplology added that definition back in 2011. Given the verb sense of to handle, I wonder if the strange end sense might have been copypasta or a brain fart? I sure can't tell what that's supposed to mean.

Re: pediatrician vs. GP, no worries. The basic underlying sense of "doctor dedicated to a specific patient for a longer duration than a single medical visit or episode" is still valid. In the context of the #2 quote, given the ambiguity in 東宮 (tōgū, literally “eastern palace” in reference to the abode of the crown prince, also used periphrastically to refer to the crown prince himself), I wasn't sure if the 担当医 term referred to the doctor's relationship to the person of the crown prince (Naruhito here; i.e. doctor in charge of the patient), or to the doctor's relationship to the organization of the crown prince's household (i.e. doctor in charge of the household medical staff). Thank you for looking further into that. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 21:26, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Keep. 医 is not a free morpheme and 担当医 is a single word. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 11:15, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Kept. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 04:50, 22 July 2020 (UTC)