Inglese - The Medical alphabet

The medical alphabet

Part IA: Acronyms and abbreviations in medical English

Anatomy

Function of the skeleton, main nomenclature of bones, muscles, and joints.

Anamnesis

Past history, family history, present complaints.

Blood

Function and composition.

Cardiology

The heart, heart cycle, heart diseases.

Communication (medical)

Doctor/patient roles.

Dictionary

Basic medical lexis and terminology, false friends in medical English, prefixes, roots, suffixes.

Endocrinology

Glands and hormones.

Emergency medicine

Protocols and triage.

Forensic medicine

Lab tests.

Acronyms and abbreviations

Lexis in medical disciplines is a challenging issue. We can state that lexis includes:

• General words, verbs, and adjectives describing the state of a patient, his/her symptoms, and complaints.
• Medical terms referring to precise medical conditions, defining parts of the body, organs, syndromes, diseases, therapies, or chemical substances in drugs.
• Lay terms that are a close equivalent of the corresponding medical terms used to make communication simpler and more direct between doctors and patients.

There are several cases in which recourse to lay terms can be beneficial and even more effective in reaching the scope:

• When the patient has little (poor) education.
• When there is the need to favour confidence and reduce the levels of anxiety and fear in the patient's mind.
• In peers' informal talks and dialogues to shorten power distance.

Latin terms that have not undergone any diachronic modification:

• A vast amount of acronyms, abbreviations, initialisms, and symbols have been closely considered in this unit.

Acronyms are a useful resource of the language and sometimes are necessary in most medical communication, where the clarity and speed of the message to be conveyed are the two sides of the same coin and must have the same weight. Therefore, by means of acronyms, we can compact long nominal strings of terms into a single word of a couple of syllables. Some acronyms are pronounced by spelling each letter (e.g., DOB standing for date of birth); others are pronounced as a single word (e.g., AIDS standing for acquired immuno-deficiency syndrome). Some acronyms are a combination of both spelling (e.g., CPAP).

Is there any method to know and learn as many of them as possible? No doubt, acronyms are best learned in context, when a trainee doctor will get familiar with the acronyms that refer to a particular situation he is likely to deal with; nonetheless, we propose a clustering of the acronyms according to their context of use.

Initialisms differ from the acronyms, in that only the initial letter of the word (or the initial letters) is used. The longer the term, the longer will likely be the initialism.

A word or a term that has been reduced in any part of its length is an abbreviation: in some cases, either the beginning or the end of the word has been made elliptical.

Symbols are semiotic codes and can appear in letters, numbers, or graphics.