1st
June
2007
Medical terminology sucks
posted by saurabh in Health!, Levity |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.
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Yikes. I hope you get to keep your spleen.
What really drives me crazy is how students get selected for their ability to memorize such jargon, not actually their ability to, you know, heal patients.
Actually, anyone with a decent grasp of Latin should be able to decipher most medical jargon.
But yes, MDs are pretty big-headed.
Medical Jargon is still in common use because many doctors have very low self-esteem. When they get to use big words like “Laryngitis” or “semi-fowlers position,” it makes them feel smarter than their patients. It also acts as a layer of insulation against criticism: people are reluctant to criticize someone who uses big words because they don’t understand what the big-word speaker is saying.
Sometimes, I look at pictures of enlarged spleens just because I have issues with hypochondria. This prompted me to email a physician friend of mine for the picture he has of his hand holding a part of a spleen that was 95x the normal size of a spleen. He declined to email it to me. I do not feel fulfilled.
I hope you’re feeling better. Is my spleen making me look fat?
medical terminology is a wonderful language that I know very well. I just spent a week learning all of it because I wanted to know more about medicine. Now I can spend more time understanding things and less time looking things up and complaining about how medical professionals use big words.
The thing about medical terminology is that it is very ordered. You mentioned spleenomegaly, so if I were to refer to anything enlarged I substitute the body part I wished to speak about for spleen. If you learn the roots and the prefixes and suffixes, which are fairly few in number, you can understand any medical phrase. If you know the word spleen and you hear itis at the end it means an enlarged spleen just as dermititis would mean an inflamed dermis. It is honestly very simple once you realize that and actively pick it out of the word. It became second nature in less than a month for me.
Evan, you’re correct that it’s very ordered; however, it’s no more ordered than actual English. There is no difference between adding the extension “-itis” to suggest inflammation and pre-prending the word “inflamed” to suggest inflammation, functionally. “The patient has inflamed skin” is just as good as “the patient has dermititis”. Except the latter is unintelligible to the patient. Whence, then, the utility in this jargon? Only in making that knowledge less accessible.