Phrases I'd like to remove from medicine 1: "just a mechanical fall"

I'm interested in how people think about things, in particular how doctors think about things and how that affects their practise. One of the ways this can occur is through terminology and the implications of this.

Falls can be broadly categorised into two - falls due to the immediate effect of a medical condition (for example losing consciousness from a sub arachnoid haemorrhage) and those not, said to be due to mechanical factors (for example a banana peel). This is a handy categorisation in younger people in whom the former requires careful consideration and evaluation for a potentially life threatening condition, and the latter not.

Unfortunately in older people so called mechanical falls THEMSELVES are a potentially life threatening condition, and require careful consideration and evaluation. However, by calling them mechanical falls creates an assumption that this is not the case, it is due to an accidental and unlikely to be repeated unfortunate event.

One of my professors had a particular concern about terminology - he felt the term CVA for CerebroVascular Accident had problematic connotations, was inaccurate and misleading and preferred stroke. At the time I didn't understand, but now things are evidently changing.