Medical terminology sucks
Hi, folks. I’m trying to get this wreck of a vessel sea-worthy again, so we’ll start off small:
During my illness I read a little bit about mononucleosis, which involved traversing a field littered with medical jargon. Jargon in general is odious and properly to be despised, but medical jargon seems especially useless, since it seems to add almost no specificity. For example, one of the symptoms of mononucleosis is “splenomegaly”. This is a fancy-pants term that means you have an enlarged spleen. What the Christ? In some instances you might have to have a “splenectomy”, also known as a spleen removal. The utility of creating and employing jargon of this sort is that it produces “macrocephaly” in doctors.
posted by saurabh in Health!, Levity | 7 Comments
Loading ...
Powered by FireStats