Talk the talk

Some amazing words, lingo, and phrases from the world of medicine.

tismus: I think it means you can't open your jaw because of muscle weakness. I can't wait to rhyme it with Christmas!

defervesce: a beautiful word with a meaning you can kinda deduce... to experience abatement of fever. I just like its sonic kinship with effervesce. I can picture your fever bubbling away. Also defervescence.

phlegmon: I can already hear Scott saying, "I am PHLEGMON!" in his bad-guy superhero voice. "Solid mass formed by inflamed connective tissue, such as forms around an appendix in appendicitis."

When my psychiatry preceptor was explaining the "kindling" effect of manic episodes in bipolar disorder, he said, "The more you have, the more you have."

Today we heard about "marsupialization." You figure it has something to do with, maybe, a pouch? Indeed! "Surgical alteration of a cyst or similar enclosed cavity by making an incision and suturing the flaps to the adjacent tissue, creating a pouch." It works when a single draining of a cyst wouldn't last or wouldn't get all the material out.

Evidence of my indoctrination into this sociolinguistic culture is that I have finally stopped abbreviating "with" as "w/" and have adopted the medical "c" with a line over it. Without = "s" with a line over it. Sort of espanoly in a couple of ways: correlates with "con" and "sin," and the line is kinda like an accent. I resisted the switch, but now I'm into it.