Medical-Terminology-Online.com

I teach medical terminology to acupuncturists. This blog won’t focus only on the acupuncturist audience, but this particular post does.

To the new acupuncture student/medical terminology student:

The topic of medical terminology is words from Western medicine. In the Masters program at PCOM, about 17% of the hours in the degree are focused on Western medicine.

Some of you may be fine with that. But if you’re like I was when I came into PCOM, then you might be baffled by that, or think Western medicine is irrelevant. I thought Oriental medicine was good, all-powerful, and never hurt people, and that Western medicine was bad, not too effective, and caused incalculable damage to patients. Let me tell you that as the 4 years of school went on, I realized that both medicines have their strengths and weaknesses. There are certainly areas where herbs and acupuncture don’t have much effect but Western medicine does. And vice versa.

But Western medicine is relevant in other ways- there is a lot of scientific info that comes out of China- they’ve identified a lot of the active and inactive chemicals in herbs- there’s a book in the library with drawings of the chemical structures… they have and are still studying the mechanisms of acupuncture from a physiogical standpoint, looking at what effect it has on nerves, blood, immune system, central nervous system, etc.-

The last day of this class, I’m going to teach you what we know about how acupuncture works from a Western perspective. It’s quite in depth, and you first need to learn the words from the medical terminology classes on blood, lymph, and nervous system to understand it - I’ve also taught it to students about to graduate from PCOM, and they were blown away- they also asked why they hadn’t been taught this before, in all the 4 years they were there- I said it was because they didn’t have me for medical terminology.

So what’s the point of doing scientific research on acupuncture and herbs?

Well, first, there’s nothing wrong with Oriental medicine- it’s not broken. Even without science and Western medicine, you could practice it safely and effectively.

But if you’re interested, you can use research to be more sure of your point selection- for example, if you could choose one of 5 points to help a stroke survivor recover their speaking ability, but one of them in particular had been shown to be effective in research, you could use that one with more confidence than just choosing one at random. In the long run, the very long run, because research takes so long, we may be able to take acupuncture, already a really good healing system, to a new level of effectiveness and specificity- by specificity I mean using the most targeted, appropriate points for the patient’s specific condition- so we can help more patients, more reliably, more often.

Research also has a role in increasing the credibility of our medicine among the scientific minded- but only those with open minds… some people will never be convinced. I’ve learned not to waste my time with those people.

And probably the most important way that medical terminology is relevant to you is that when you graduate and go into practice, you’ll have patients with diagnoses from Western medicine. You can just ignore that, or you can use it. You can request their medical records and read them- but you need to understand medical terminology to read them. You can use this extra information to better understand your patient’s situation and how you might help it.

And if, e.g. you know your patient is immunocompromised, has leukopenia, or low white blood cell count, and that, according to research, an acupoint increases white blood cell count, you make it part of the picture. If you know enough about the effects of Oriental medicine on the body in Western medical terms, you can be more effective.

Because this patient’s regular doctor will be watching the WBC count, and if you watch it, too, you can see the objective effects of your acupuncture. You can also use Oriental medicine techniques like taking the pulse and asking questions, but it’s nice to use lab tests, too- it increases your confidence, not to mention the patient’s confidence that acupuncture is doing something, and maybe impressing the doctor, too.

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.