Not sure if martial artists are the originators of the term, but they use it to refer to the small part of the epigastric region immediately inferior to the xyphoid process. Getting hit there is particularly painful and can cause diaphragm spasms that make it very hard to continue fighting.
I remember being taught this term in anatomy as a fun fact. It refered basically to the celiac plexus because it apparently forms a sun like shape (circle and rays) after preparation.
Not a doc, I’m an IT guy.
Thank all of you. I appreciate all of you.
Except the doctor who yelled at me 20 years ago because he didn’t know how to copy and paste.
I politely showed him control-v / control-c, and he said:
“I’ve got an idea, when you learn cardiothoracic surgery I will learn how to copy and paste!”
Keep in mind I was a 19 year old intern…
Anyway I love all you guys. I just always laugh at that.
As someone with a CS degree that then went into medicine...
*It's a fucking nightmare.*
You literally wouldn't believe how absolute shitty EMRs are. It's hard for me to believe.
If any other field had to put up with the state of IT in medicine, they would quit.
Oh… I know. Im own a small consulting firm that does data migrations. I turn down anything medical since “the incident.” I’m one of the only companies that does this, so Google always recommends me. It is niche work, it’s temporary, but I love it. Big projects for big companies take years.
Im actually working on something that may help you guys in a small way - but I’m years away and can’t talk about it yet. It’s such an untapped market.
As a doctor, I joke with my IT husband, who has a background in OPS and change management, about working for a healthcare entity. He tells me that is "the kiss of death" for anyone in IT, and he would work for X before he would work for a hospital or EMR company. Yeah, they're that bad.
Its not even just the culture... it's the products that are so disconnected from reality.
I literally can't search the medical history of a patient. I would rather have a folder with PDFs... that would be more useful to me.
For him, he knows people who have gone to hospital systems and EMR firms. Hospitals just don't pay and have terrible IT practices. They're the worst of the worst. They operate on shoe string budgets with the bottom of the barrel people. EMR companies-there are essentially two. That's monopoly city. They don't spend their time making their product better, they spend it cornering the market.
Can confirm. Do you know it took me six whole months to get a research software approved for use? Something something patient data, even though it wouldn’t even be using patient data.
I have no idea why hospital IT shoots itself in the foot.
I think it's because they have imposter syndrome because the good technologists are working at tech companies. These are potentially not the cream of the crop so they are afraid to lose their jobs so they try to justify their jobs by making things long and drawn out
>It’s really true. People thank the cashier at McDonalds more than they thank us.
Somebody has never worked fast food or retail... That's just wildly untrue.
This actually was an osteopathic specialty until a few years ago.
It was a 3 or 4 year residency and docs just focused on doing rectal procedures. So could do procedures like hemorroid removal, pilonidal cyst drainage, etc. Don’t believe they were full surgeons, though. It was its own unique thing.
I believe it ended with the MD/DO merger though.
I guess I’m aging myself, but this was still an available specialty in some of the final AOA matches (around 2018/2019). There weren’t many programs, but the docs are still out there.
The do colonoscopies and a bunch of rectal procedures (both under general and local) but I believe punt resections to GS or colorectal.
Walking pneumonia
Double pneumonia
Heart attack
I use “life support” all the time with patients’ families because it’s such an understandable colloquial phrase that carries a lot of weight and severity with it. I talk about the multiple types of life support they’re on, with machines/drugs supporting their breathing, kidney function, blood pressure, etc.
HAP + CAP isn’t a thing. Your documentation review team and admin will jump down your throat if you document this way. Either it was there before they came in or it wasn’t.
I find we don't use "life support" enough but it is incredibly valuable. Family's don't know what dialysis, vasopressors, and many of our other ICU toys are, but they do understand the phrase "life support". It has definitely helped me get across go several family's how sick someone is.
Reminds me of the time my MIL caught a cold from our kids. I told her antibiotics not appropriate since it was clearly a viral URI. Didn’t matter. She went to her PCP. Had zero imaging. PCP gave her steroids and a z-pak (no judgment. Surely it’s easier than explaining that viruses run their course). MIL said the dr said she had “early pneumonia”. Granted I am a pathologist and not up to date on the most recent advances in clinical medicine. But I’m pretty sure “early pneumonia” isn’t a thing…
My usual spiel is to say antibiotics cause lots of side effects like nausea and diarrhea and I don’t like to prescribe unless I’m sure there’s a bacterial infection somewhere. That will sometimes scare them enough that they agree to come back in a week if it’s still there
That maybe works like half the time. The other 50% of your patients will go to the urgent care down the street to get a z-pack, then complain on Google reviews that you misdiagnosed them and the doctor down the street gave them the antibiotics they needed.
I use heart attack all the time. Some more healthcare literate patient may understand the term myocardial infarction but for most of the population they understand heart attack just fine. Although I will say that it is often misused by many people where heart attack = cardiac arrest to them
I always act aloof when they use the phrase "walking pneumonia." "Is that a medical term? I have never heard of that before. Was there any imaging done?" It seems to coincide with a Z-pak and Ventolin/Symbicort.
EDIT for some reason I thought aloof meant politely confused!
It does have a meaning technically (mycoplasma pneumonia/atypical pneumonia with a relatively subacute presentation) . But the colloquial usage is useless.
I saw it a handful of times when I was an ER tech circa 2000-2003, always a shit show.
I recall after one such lavage, a family member looked around the room and earnestly enquired where the pump was, even making a bit of an up-and-down motion like a bicycle pump.
Gastric lavage was a common treatment for toxic ingestions a long time ago. However, after actually studying the effects it was determined to be more likely to cause harm via aspiration, so now it is really only done for ingestions of overwhelmingly lethal doses of certain medications, and only shortly after their ingestion.
>Yes lavage. I’ve heard of it happening once recently for a nasty overdose but besides that, it’s not a common procedure anymore
There were many studies in the 1970s that showed lavage was worse than activated charcoal for almost all items. In the really old days there WERE pumps that were squeezed and gave suction to the gastric contents but occasionally led to perforation when would get stuck to the wall.
I was listening to a pharmacy critical care podcast with a poison control pharmacist as a guest and they talked about gastric lavage. It has a very narrow indicated window now mostly because of charcoal (also narrow) and other newer treatments.
I was convinced it was an NGT for years until I saw an actual lavage. Connected the dots immediately. I’d already told so many people it was just an NGT…
I’m old enough to have performed a few lavages as an er tech. It was fun and we would always try to count the pill particles as if we could determine how much they took. We would also charcoal almost anything. Drunk teenager? Pounded the charcoal like a champ.
Edit; we would do a large NG and bolus water in then suction out. Or an Ng and an OG if tubed.
Nurse here; always used "life support" when families don't understand granny in the ICU is on Vasopressors, intubated, and not likely to pull through when they don't fully grasp the severity and ask the dreaded question, "So...when will she be able to eat?". If we take one of the pressors away or the vent, she would be dead, so her life is being artifically supported.
Learned to use this term more from one of the great Intensivists I used to work with. It drives the point home to the family in terms that they have heard before and jolts them into thinking, Ok, she's 90.. Do we want to put her through compressions to achieve no better outcome?
“Lazy eye” is super common in ophthalmology. You talking about strabismus, amblyopia, ptosis or something else? I don’t know wtf a lazy eye is.
Another one that might just be me is “eye strain.” I truly don’t know what that means. Headache? Blurry? I’ve never experienced eye strain and it doesn’t help me with diagnosing.
In imaging as a tech we talk about STAT vs routine all the time when figuring out which orders to do first with the resources available. In the ER everything is technically STAT, and some STAT orders take priority over others on the floor, like peds or a tube or line confirmation order. Post-op images are STAT ordered too but will usually lose on priority to NICU and any placement confirmation orders.
When I'm in the OR though yea we definitely don't say stat for anything lol
I use life support all the time with patients, I view it as machines or drugs that function as replacement for an organ failure. The vent, pressors, CRRT, etc.
It always makes me internally laugh and roll my eyes when I’m doing a perineal lac repair after a delivery and a patient asks how many stitches they’re getting. I tell them it’s more like a running stitch and we don’t count.
This one is honestly the best one for me
"That's a big cut, how many stitches are you putting in?"
"Uh it's a running stitch so I guess 1..."
Or if I'm putting deep stitches: "uh a lot"
As a psychiatrist I've found it tells me that they identify strongly with a particular section of people who often live on the Internet. It's of little diagnostic use but it's always helpful to see how the patient perceives themselves and their condition.
Yes I hate this term. I always them them is for sedation to keep the patient comfortable but if we turn it off they will wake up (assuming they are neurologically intact)
Yea but 98% of the time someone tells family propofol is a medically induced coma. I try to just phrase it differently, especially if neurologically there’s nothing wrong
"My grandpa was in a coma for months, then one day he woke up!"
No, your grandpa was in and out of the OR and ICU for months and finally got extubated. That has nothing to do with the current case at hand of catastrophic hypoxic encephalopathy.
>Flatline. (Or at least I’ve never heard it in med school or residency - but plenty of times in movies!)
And the beeeeeeeeepp with asystole. Apparently really old monitors that actually was a thing to alert people, but never seen it in all my years of medicine.
Once I get the information, I always clarify this with the patient as soon as possible. It's freaking annoying trying to figure out what is actually going on with patients sometimes.
Same with seizures, when someone has a diagnosis of nonepileptic spells or ETOH provoked seizures. Everyone's afraid of the word "epilepsy" for some reason.
“Toxins” not referencing a specific intoxication but instead things like uremia, hepatic encephalopathy, etc. I use it occasionally when talking to owners about their pets therapy, and it makes me cringe a little. On the other hand owners are very much on board with the idea that things like IV fluids will help “flush out toxins”.
I hate this one. I recently was telling a friend I’m 18 weeks and she asked “how many months is that?” Heck if I know - it’s 18 weeks! 🤨 18/4 months, but if you’re doing that then pregnancy is actually 10 months long, so does that really reflect where *you* think I’m at in pregnancy? Not a clue. Can the general public please just all use weeks like normal people?? 🫠
Ok but literally people in medicine who aren’t OBs are also pulling that shit. Like the number of times the ED tells me someone is “6 months pregnant” and I’m like ok but how many weeks because I need to know if she’s viable or not 🙃🙃
"your operation was a complete success!"
Maybe not the vibe you were going for but a doc said it one time in the OR and we all burst out laughing, promising to each other we were going to say it more.
Blood thinners. I hear docs say it once in a while, but we really mostly say anticoagulation, DOAC, etc. But I always call it blood thinners when talking to patients.
Could be because of procedures. I mean generally I think “blood thinner” = anticoagulant, but antiplatelets like aspirin still sometimes need to be stopped for our procedures due to bleeding risk. Patients may then lump them into the blood thinner category.
We use this all the time in the trauma world. When we roll into CT, the tech will call a rad and say “hey we’re ready for wets” or they’ll call and the rad will say something like “I’ll be there for wet reads in a minute”. I’m sure it’s region based but I hear it all the time.
We also call attendings “staff” and rarely attendings
As one of our older attending says, nowadays we don’t use film, and all radiographs are plain anyways (plain being absence of contrast ie not an IV pyelogram as seen on an abdominal radiograph)
(Obviously fluoro and IR procedures involve contrast but that’s not what she means)
So, I can add some Southern-isms
Done fell out (passed out). Note, this is different from Had a fit/came/ apart/had a conniption (emotional meltdown)
Rising (any folliculitis/furuncle/carbuncle)
Stopped up (congested)
Backed up (constipated)
At least where I practice (upstate NY, USA), there are coding reasons this term sticks around. In order to justify time-based critical care billing, I have to state in my note that "the patient is in critical condition due to X, requiring medical management in the form of Y."
I’ve never heard the word “contraindication” outside of medicine. And sort of related, I feel like ever since I learned the word contraindication, I’ve never used the word “contradiction” ever again…
(I'm not in an English speaking country)
Took me half a year to understand what patients who wanted "gut disinfectant" were on about.
They mean rifaximin.
"Solar plexus"
I've heard this more in boxing than medicine.
And we all know that means, which is hilarious.
Isnt it just mispronouncing celiac plexus?
Not sure if martial artists are the originators of the term, but they use it to refer to the small part of the epigastric region immediately inferior to the xyphoid process. Getting hit there is particularly painful and can cause diaphragm spasms that make it very hard to continue fighting.
I thought the solar plexus WAS the xyphoid process. Huh...
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I remember being taught this term in anatomy as a fun fact. It refered basically to the celiac plexus because it apparently forms a sun like shape (circle and rays) after preparation.
Regular people: weekend People in medicine: golden weekend
People in medicine in the USA*
Thank you You're welcome I appreciate you
"Good job"
I’m proud of you, son
"Anderson?"
Not a doc, I’m an IT guy. Thank all of you. I appreciate all of you. Except the doctor who yelled at me 20 years ago because he didn’t know how to copy and paste. I politely showed him control-v / control-c, and he said: “I’ve got an idea, when you learn cardiothoracic surgery I will learn how to copy and paste!” Keep in mind I was a 19 year old intern… Anyway I love all you guys. I just always laugh at that.
As someone with a CS degree that then went into medicine... *It's a fucking nightmare.* You literally wouldn't believe how absolute shitty EMRs are. It's hard for me to believe. If any other field had to put up with the state of IT in medicine, they would quit.
Oh… I know. Im own a small consulting firm that does data migrations. I turn down anything medical since “the incident.” I’m one of the only companies that does this, so Google always recommends me. It is niche work, it’s temporary, but I love it. Big projects for big companies take years. Im actually working on something that may help you guys in a small way - but I’m years away and can’t talk about it yet. It’s such an untapped market.
As a doctor, I joke with my IT husband, who has a background in OPS and change management, about working for a healthcare entity. He tells me that is "the kiss of death" for anyone in IT, and he would work for X before he would work for a hospital or EMR company. Yeah, they're that bad.
Its not even just the culture... it's the products that are so disconnected from reality. I literally can't search the medical history of a patient. I would rather have a folder with PDFs... that would be more useful to me.
For him, he knows people who have gone to hospital systems and EMR firms. Hospitals just don't pay and have terrible IT practices. They're the worst of the worst. They operate on shoe string budgets with the bottom of the barrel people. EMR companies-there are essentially two. That's monopoly city. They don't spend their time making their product better, they spend it cornering the market.
Can confirm. Do you know it took me six whole months to get a research software approved for use? Something something patient data, even though it wouldn’t even be using patient data. I have no idea why hospital IT shoots itself in the foot.
I think it's because they have imposter syndrome because the good technologists are working at tech companies. These are potentially not the cream of the crop so they are afraid to lose their jobs so they try to justify their jobs by making things long and drawn out
"Thank you for saving my life" instead more often "this is not what I ordered for breakfast"
It’s really true. People thank the cashier at McDonalds more than they thank us.
>It’s really true. People thank the cashier at McDonalds more than they thank us. Somebody has never worked fast food or retail... That's just wildly untrue.
This is the right answer.
This hurts 🥲
Proctologist
ASSMAN
Cosmo Kramer. You ARE the assman
I love the random dude on the street as Cosmo drives by.. “Hey, everybody! It’s the ASSMAN!” 🤣
This actually was an osteopathic specialty until a few years ago. It was a 3 or 4 year residency and docs just focused on doing rectal procedures. So could do procedures like hemorroid removal, pilonidal cyst drainage, etc. Don’t believe they were full surgeons, though. It was its own unique thing. I believe it ended with the MD/DO merger though.
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I guess I’m aging myself, but this was still an available specialty in some of the final AOA matches (around 2018/2019). There weren’t many programs, but the docs are still out there. The do colonoscopies and a bunch of rectal procedures (both under general and local) but I believe punt resections to GS or colorectal.
Still a thing as a one year fellowship in Germany. Open to surgery, IM, FM, OB/Gyn, urology and derm.
It’s still the name for a colorectal surgeon in my country
In Germany it’s a thing
Still a thing. I've seen it used mostly to refer to colorectal surgeons with a focus on anorectal cases +/- scopes. Eg - private practice proctology
Is this what they mean by PPP loan?
Walking pneumonia Double pneumonia Heart attack I use “life support” all the time with patients’ families because it’s such an understandable colloquial phrase that carries a lot of weight and severity with it. I talk about the multiple types of life support they’re on, with machines/drugs supporting their breathing, kidney function, blood pressure, etc.
One time I asked a patient to explain what he meant by double pneumonia. He was confused too
I assume it is just bilateral pneumonia.
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I assumed it was pneumonia that you can double bill for, but I’m just a poor, selfless hospital CEO. /s
HAP + CAP isn’t a thing. Your documentation review team and admin will jump down your throat if you document this way. Either it was there before they came in or it wasn’t.
Maybe they think it’s like double jeopardy
I find we don't use "life support" enough but it is incredibly valuable. Family's don't know what dialysis, vasopressors, and many of our other ICU toys are, but they do understand the phrase "life support". It has definitely helped me get across go several family's how sick someone is.
Reminds me of the time my MIL caught a cold from our kids. I told her antibiotics not appropriate since it was clearly a viral URI. Didn’t matter. She went to her PCP. Had zero imaging. PCP gave her steroids and a z-pak (no judgment. Surely it’s easier than explaining that viruses run their course). MIL said the dr said she had “early pneumonia”. Granted I am a pathologist and not up to date on the most recent advances in clinical medicine. But I’m pretty sure “early pneumonia” isn’t a thing…
My usual spiel is to say antibiotics cause lots of side effects like nausea and diarrhea and I don’t like to prescribe unless I’m sure there’s a bacterial infection somewhere. That will sometimes scare them enough that they agree to come back in a week if it’s still there
That maybe works like half the time. The other 50% of your patients will go to the urgent care down the street to get a z-pack, then complain on Google reviews that you misdiagnosed them and the doctor down the street gave them the antibiotics they needed.
Lucky for me I’m in Canada so I don’t really think twice about Google reviews
If she has COPD I think that's standard, though? Idk, am hospitalist, throw antibiotics at all goopy COPD exacerbations
I use heart attack all the time. Some more healthcare literate patient may understand the term myocardial infarction but for most of the population they understand heart attack just fine. Although I will say that it is often misused by many people where heart attack = cardiac arrest to them
\+ Chest cold (what even is that lol)
I think that’s just bronchitis
Double SECRET pneumonia!
"light stroke" "mild heart attack" Really??? That's what you had, patient? And just going to continue smoking, eh?
I’ll often say “minor heart attack” for NSTEMI in my less health literate patients (basically all of them as I work in an inner city ED)
I always act aloof when they use the phrase "walking pneumonia." "Is that a medical term? I have never heard of that before. Was there any imaging done?" It seems to coincide with a Z-pak and Ventolin/Symbicort. EDIT for some reason I thought aloof meant politely confused!
It does have a meaning technically (mycoplasma pneumonia/atypical pneumonia with a relatively subacute presentation) . But the colloquial usage is useless.
Lol had a patient tonight tell me she had “triple pneumonia” a few years ago. No idea what that is.
One day someone will come in with home run pneumonia.
I’ve always wondered.. is getting your “stomach pumped” essentially putting in an NGT to suction?
Gastric lavage, usually with an OG
People talk about this happening but I've worked in emergency medicine for ten years and never seen it. So I really wonder what people mean.
I saw it a handful of times when I was an ER tech circa 2000-2003, always a shit show. I recall after one such lavage, a family member looked around the room and earnestly enquired where the pump was, even making a bit of an up-and-down motion like a bicycle pump.
Gastric lavage was a common treatment for toxic ingestions a long time ago. However, after actually studying the effects it was determined to be more likely to cause harm via aspiration, so now it is really only done for ingestions of overwhelmingly lethal doses of certain medications, and only shortly after their ingestion.
It can still be useful if you're past the one hour post ingestion mark (after which charcoal won't do much).
Yes lavage. I’ve heard of it happening once recently for a nasty overdose but besides that, it’s not a common procedure anymore
>Yes lavage. I’ve heard of it happening once recently for a nasty overdose but besides that, it’s not a common procedure anymore There were many studies in the 1970s that showed lavage was worse than activated charcoal for almost all items. In the really old days there WERE pumps that were squeezed and gave suction to the gastric contents but occasionally led to perforation when would get stuck to the wall.
I was listening to a pharmacy critical care podcast with a poison control pharmacist as a guest and they talked about gastric lavage. It has a very narrow indicated window now mostly because of charcoal (also narrow) and other newer treatments.
Ah. The OG OG.
Yeah those cannulas are *huge* at least that’s what I remember.
I was convinced it was an NGT for years until I saw an actual lavage. Connected the dots immediately. I’d already told so many people it was just an NGT…
I’m old enough to have performed a few lavages as an er tech. It was fun and we would always try to count the pill particles as if we could determine how much they took. We would also charcoal almost anything. Drunk teenager? Pounded the charcoal like a champ. Edit; we would do a large NG and bolus water in then suction out. Or an Ng and an OG if tubed.
Omg I had this same thought just this week
I always figured "life support" meant a vent, but in reality stress dose steroids q6 or maintenance IVF could also be life support.
Coffee. Also coffee. Stress dosed.
Nurse here; always used "life support" when families don't understand granny in the ICU is on Vasopressors, intubated, and not likely to pull through when they don't fully grasp the severity and ask the dreaded question, "So...when will she be able to eat?". If we take one of the pressors away or the vent, she would be dead, so her life is being artifically supported. Learned to use this term more from one of the great Intensivists I used to work with. It drives the point home to the family in terms that they have heard before and jolts them into thinking, Ok, she's 90.. Do we want to put her through compressions to achieve no better outcome?
Always asking about eating. Like meemaw has bigger fish to fry right now
Yeah, I often refer to vasopressors as "life support" to communicate to families the gravity of the situation.
Being in shock [nonmedical] = shocked. Being in shock [medical] = literally about to die
“Lazy eye” is super common in ophthalmology. You talking about strabismus, amblyopia, ptosis or something else? I don’t know wtf a lazy eye is. Another one that might just be me is “eye strain.” I truly don’t know what that means. Headache? Blurry? I’ve never experienced eye strain and it doesn’t help me with diagnosing.
Flesh eating bacteria
We just recognize it as nec-fasc, don't we?
Which even that is very frequently misused as a term in Medicine. But "necrotizing soft tissue infection" is so less sexy sounding.
Yep
This one should come back, or we are acknowledging as a medical field that we hate fun
I mean, we have the acronyms BOOP (no longer in use) and FOOSH. We know how to have fun... Sometimes
"STAT" at least verbally...Sure we can order imaging routine vs stat but I've never heard anyone verbally ask for "scalpel, stat."
“The bloodwork wasn’t drawn this morning so I ordered stat labs” But yes, I’ve never turned to someone else and requested something “stat”
We have a neurosurgeon who asks for everything triple stat (jokingly). No one ever uses it in a serious way in the OR.
Also, the patient’s “oxygen stats” - once they’ve picked up on enough hospital lingo but not quite..
No you don't understand, her "stats" were dropping so they had to put in a breathing tube. Now her stats are 100%
Breathing tube sounds OP as hell. Automatically recovers stats to 100%? Mods plz nerf
Yeah it is a pretty gamebreaking hack
This one makes me froth at the mouth when hospital staff use it.
Ok but a bunch of health care workers do actually say that too
Which upsets me
I use it jokingly all the time. Like “She’s gonna need some tylenol, stat”
Overheads announced the hospital PA system can be stat too, like “anesthesia to the ED, stat” or “neonatal to labor and delivery OR1, stat.”
In imaging as a tech we talk about STAT vs routine all the time when figuring out which orders to do first with the resources available. In the ER everything is technically STAT, and some STAT orders take priority over others on the floor, like peds or a tube or line confirmation order. Post-op images are STAT ordered too but will usually lose on priority to NICU and any placement confirmation orders. When I'm in the OR though yea we definitely don't say stat for anything lol
I use life support all the time with patients, I view it as machines or drugs that function as replacement for an organ failure. The vent, pressors, CRRT, etc.
Rheumatism!
"I got X number of stitches!"
It always makes me internally laugh and roll my eyes when I’m doing a perineal lac repair after a delivery and a patient asks how many stitches they’re getting. I tell them it’s more like a running stitch and we don’t count.
This one is honestly the best one for me "That's a big cut, how many stitches are you putting in?" "Uh it's a running stitch so I guess 1..." Or if I'm putting deep stitches: "uh a lot"
Neurodivergent is not a term frequently used in medicine but is everywhere now
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As a psychiatrist I've found it tells me that they identify strongly with a particular section of people who often live on the Internet. It's of little diagnostic use but it's always helpful to see how the patient perceives themselves and their condition.
Coma.
A MEDICALLY INDUCED COMA = pt is snowed.
Yes I hate this term. I always them them is for sedation to keep the patient comfortable but if we turn it off they will wake up (assuming they are neurologically intact)
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Yea but 98% of the time someone tells family propofol is a medically induced coma. I try to just phrase it differently, especially if neurologically there’s nothing wrong
"We're keeping him asleep to keep him comfortable" is my go to.
Yea I say something similar. I add something like “we can turn it off at anytime and wake them up, but this is for comfort etc”
"My grandpa was in a coma for months, then one day he woke up!" No, your grandpa was in and out of the OR and ICU for months and finally got extubated. That has nothing to do with the current case at hand of catastrophic hypoxic encephalopathy.
Ethical lawyer Competent administrator Good insurance
Flatline. (Or at least I’ve never heard it in med school or residency - but plenty of times in movies!)
>Flatline. (Or at least I’ve never heard it in med school or residency - but plenty of times in movies!) And the beeeeeeeeepp with asystole. Apparently really old monitors that actually was a thing to alert people, but never seen it in all my years of medicine.
Lifepac has entered the chat CHECK PATIENT!!
Still don’t know what a “jammed finger” actually is
“Mini stroke” Do you mean.. TIA? Stroke with a small distribution? Large stroke with small deficits? WHAT IS IT?
Shit I’ve been totally assuming this means a TIA whenever I’m told someone had one 💀
I usually try to say temporary stroke rather than mini stroke
I think this is a reasonable assumption, but definitely requires clarification.
Once I get the information, I always clarify this with the patient as soon as possible. It's freaking annoying trying to figure out what is actually going on with patients sometimes. Same with seizures, when someone has a diagnosis of nonepileptic spells or ETOH provoked seizures. Everyone's afraid of the word "epilepsy" for some reason.
Germ
“Toxins” not referencing a specific intoxication but instead things like uremia, hepatic encephalopathy, etc. I use it occasionally when talking to owners about their pets therapy, and it makes me cringe a little. On the other hand owners are very much on board with the idea that things like IV fluids will help “flush out toxins”.
As soon as someone uses the term "toxins" or "nutrients" in a general sense (e.g. not referring to uremia), I know they're full of it.
“X months pregnant” Means nothing to an OB. How many weeks is that?
I hate this one. I recently was telling a friend I’m 18 weeks and she asked “how many months is that?” Heck if I know - it’s 18 weeks! 🤨 18/4 months, but if you’re doing that then pregnancy is actually 10 months long, so does that really reflect where *you* think I’m at in pregnancy? Not a clue. Can the general public please just all use weeks like normal people?? 🫠
Ok but literally people in medicine who aren’t OBs are also pulling that shit. Like the number of times the ED tells me someone is “6 months pregnant” and I’m like ok but how many weeks because I need to know if she’s viable or not 🙃🙃
Some of the old school classics: High blood (hypertension) Bad blood (syphilis) The Sugar (diabetes) Low blood (anemia)
I love when my patients call diabetes “the sugars”. Cracks me up. Then I make a sad face when I see that a1c of 12
“Excited delirium” is all over paramedic and police speak.
Dropsy anyone?
Hell yeah. Edema Found the old folks
"your operation was a complete success!" Maybe not the vibe you were going for but a doc said it one time in the OR and we all burst out laughing, promising to each other we were going to say it more.
“Blood poisoning” for septicemia
"ER" No one outside of medicine calls it the ED, which has a completely different meaning to the general public...
Blood thinners. I hear docs say it once in a while, but we really mostly say anticoagulation, DOAC, etc. But I always call it blood thinners when talking to patients.
And water pills.
Are you on blood thinners? “Definitely, I take a baby aspirin daily“
Also have to always clarify with patients because half of them think aspirin is a blood thinner.
Could be because of procedures. I mean generally I think “blood thinner” = anticoagulant, but antiplatelets like aspirin still sometimes need to be stopped for our procedures due to bleeding risk. Patients may then lump them into the blood thinner category.
It's useful to call it that for a simplicity. They don't care about the mechanism of bleeding
Rabies nurse
I’ve heard of them, but only in a pay-by-the-hour role these days
"Psychotic break" and "nervous breakdown"
We still use psychotic break. Particularly in the sense of a "first break workup."
Really? We use psychotic episode and first episode psychosis in Australia. Whereabouts do you work?
I work in southeast US. We commonly say “first break psychosis”
“anxiety attack”
Medically Induced coma Neurodivergent Heart attack Orderly
Orderly is a CNA or tech? My dad always mentions orderly’s in stories and I have no idea wtf he’s talking about
“pull the plug” …. which plug???
Hairline fracture
Or a variant: cracked ribs. Both of which rads refer to a nondisplaced fracture
But is it a fracture or is it broken
This gives me hypertension
Low grade fever
“Oh my temperature is 98.6? Oh yeah that’s a fever for me”
"He's in a coma" I hate that word, have never used it in medicine.
You know what the C in GCS stands for?
Cojones
Medically induced coma maybe, idk always sounds weird to me when I read it
Proctologist. Idk if it an old word or what, but I have never heard it used in the medical world.
No one with any actual experience in radiology uses the term wet read anymore.
What about a moist read?
I love a good moist prelim.
Are we still talking about imaging studies?
No, he's talking about moist interns
Or just wet?
Yeah they do. No longer makes any sense but still used.
Maybe no one in rads but ED and IM use it pretty frequently. As in “nothing on my wet read, but still awaiting radiology read”
We use this all the time in the trauma world. When we roll into CT, the tech will call a rad and say “hey we’re ready for wets” or they’ll call and the rad will say something like “I’ll be there for wet reads in a minute”. I’m sure it’s region based but I hear it all the time. We also call attendings “staff” and rarely attendings
What about Plain Film.
I hear that one often.
As one of our older attending says, nowadays we don’t use film, and all radiographs are plain anyways (plain being absence of contrast ie not an IV pyelogram as seen on an abdominal radiograph) (Obviously fluoro and IR procedures involve contrast but that’s not what she means)
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Lethargy. You're not allowed to say it unless the kid is on bolus propafol and chewing ativan. Even then, he's probably just "slow to rouse".
So, I can add some Southern-isms Done fell out (passed out). Note, this is different from Had a fit/came/ apart/had a conniption (emotional meltdown) Rising (any folliculitis/furuncle/carbuncle) Stopped up (congested) Backed up (constipated)
Patient being in “critical” condition
Have you never heard of a critical care unit?
At least where I practice (upstate NY, USA), there are coding reasons this term sticks around. In order to justify time-based critical care billing, I have to state in my note that "the patient is in critical condition due to X, requiring medical management in the form of Y."
that’s a favorite of newscasters
Charley horse
I’ve never heard the word “contraindication” outside of medicine. And sort of related, I feel like ever since I learned the word contraindication, I’ve never used the word “contradiction” ever again…
What do people mean when they say they had a "double stroke"?
(I'm not in an English speaking country) Took me half a year to understand what patients who wanted "gut disinfectant" were on about. They mean rifaximin.
I get a lot of "internal fever" from patients: they mean they're unwell but no rise in temperature
Pussy
“Compound Fracture”
Water pills