The other day while challenging us with a case in which the patient needed extensive advanced medical care the prof asked "OK, what next?". I responded with "Does the patient have medical insurance?" And the professor joked that first on the TO DO list is a "wallet biopsy". We laughed. It is necessary to assess people's ability to pay for treatments, but too painful to use such terms with a patient. But at that point I decided that I need to begin collecting medical slang, not jargon but the most offensive and borderline slang that I hear. I have always been interested in language.
So tonight I was working on my homework assignment for clinic synthesis, and trying to find the abbreviations for a few things, when I ran across the wikipedia page listing medical slang. I have pilfered the entire contents of the wiki page, and started adding to it. I think this may be the beginning of something especially perverse. I LOL'd when I saw the definition of the acronym TEETH.
( medical slang list here, not all offensive, moved forward from 2/20/09 )
