A student stands over a patient, needle poised. They have a “perfect” prescription: a textbook combination of points harvested from a lecture slide on chronic lower back pain. But as the needle meets the skin, the student hesitates - the symptom of a quiet habit that has taken hold of our profession. We routinely say we “prescribe” points. It sounds efficient. It echoes the authority of biomedical culture and fits neatly into the insurance field. But vocabulary is never neutral; repeated long enough, it dictates behavior.
Karen Karp, EdD
Dr. Karen Karp is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a former longtime distinguished teaching profesor of mathmatics education at the University of Louisville. She is a certified mathematics teacher, certified special-education teacher, and has coauthored numerous books on mathematics, while serving on numerous grant committees and advisory boards over the years.