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Medical slang is the use of acronyms and informal terminology to describe patients, other healthcare personnel and medical concepts. Some terms are pejorative. In English, medical slang has entered popular culture via television hospital and forensic science dramas such as ER, House M.D., NCIS, Scrubs, and Grey's Anatomy, and through fiction, in books such as The House of God by Samuel Shem ...
The main discussion of these abbreviations in the context of drug prescriptions and other medical prescriptions is at List of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions. Some of these abbreviations are best not used, as marked and explained here.
This is a list of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions, including hospital orders (the patient-directed part of which is referred to as sig codes). This list does not include abbreviations for pharmaceuticals or drug name suffixes such as CD, CR, ER, XT (See Time release technology § List of abbreviations for those).
Meaning Δ: diagnosis; change: ΔΔ: differential diagnosis (the list of possible diagnoses, and the effort to narrow that list) +ve: positive (as in the result of a test) # fracture: #NOF: fracture to the neck of the femur ℞ (R with crossed tail) prescription: Ψ: psychiatry, psychosis: Σ: sigmoidoscopy: x/12: x number of months x/40: x ...
Pronunciation follows convention outside the medical field, in which acronyms are generally pronounced as if they were a word (JAMA, SIDS), initialisms are generally pronounced as individual letters (DNA, SSRI), and abbreviations generally use the expansion (soln. = "solution", sup. = "superior").
Second, medical roots generally go together according to language, i.e., Greek prefixes occur with Greek suffixes and Latin prefixes with Latin suffixes. Although international scientific vocabulary is not stringent about segregating combining forms of different languages, it is advisable when coining new words not to mix different lingual roots.
The word is first attested in the mid 1300s as dewelappe ("fold of skin that hangs from the throat of oxen and kine"), from lappe ("loose piece", from Old English læppa), but the first element *dew(e)-is of nebulous origin and meaning; it probably was altered by folk etymology with "dew".
ultra: from Latin, meaning beyond; micro and scopic: from ancient Greek, meaning small looking, referring to the fineness of particulates; silico-: from Latin, silicon; volcano: from Latin, referring to volcano; coni: from ancient Greek (κόνις, kónis) which means dust-osis: from ancient Greek, suffix to indicate a medical condition