What’s the point of your Medical Terminology class?

The most important thing in medical terminology is to learning to decode western medical words. I can only teach you a limited number of medical terms. It’s better if I teach you how to take medical terms apart and figure out or at least make an educated guess. So, the words you do learn will mostly be examples to teach you how to take medical terms apart. You’ll try this on scientific abstracts, medical case studies, and so on.

Why is Western Medical Terminology so important?

Even if you are an alternative medicine practitioner, your patients will see a Western medicine doctor at some point. Not only may you need to read their medical records, or communicate with the Western doctor, but the patients expect you to understand these words.

Medical Terminology Online in Research Abstracts

Also interesting to acupuncturists- there is quite a bit of acupuncture and herb research out there, and you can’t benefit from it, or help your patients based on it, if you can’t read it. For example, check out these acupuncture research resources.

Why do we have a special language for medicine?

  • Efficiency: As you’ll see soon enough on the worksheets, medical terminology can pack a lot of information into fewer letters, fewer syllables.
  • Accuracy: Paying attention to the specific meaning of special words increases the accuracy of our communication. When we’re dealing with someone else’s health, a miscommunication can easily be harmful. We have a responsibility to know how to say what we mean, and understand what other medical professionals mean.
  • Propriety: At least in the past, it was sometimes thought inappropriate to tell a patient the whole truth about their condition (that’s less than unfashionable now), though you might need to speak to a colleague with the patient present, which you could do with a special medical terminology.
  • Power: Sometimes the history of Western medicine is told in terms of power, and medical terminology is described as a secret knowledge with which physicians gained power. I’ve heard personal anecdotes about medical training in which physicians were chided for using regular language instead of medical terminology.

The word language comes from the Latin, lengua, which means tongue. A glossary is a dictionary, and the word glossary comes from the Greek for tongue, glosso.

So what? (you may ask)

Hey now, if you don’t think that’s interesting, you’re going to have a tough time learning this stuff!

Let’s try again. Isn’t it cool that the words for a culture’s words and the a collection of words and their meanings both come from the Latin and Greek for tongue?? Yeah, that’s what I thought.