- PARIS (AFP) - The doctor
purses his lips, looks at you pityingly over his half-moon spectacles and
quietly writes something on his clipboard, something short, sharp and authoritative.
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- He turns away to answer the phone and you seize the diversion
to sneak a look at your case notes.
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- He has written: "Plumbum oscillans."
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- What disease can this be? It sounds contagious... maybe
even fatal... Is it time to phone friends and family and say farewell?
Is your will up to date?
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- Relax.
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- Plumbum oscillans is no threat to health -- it is Latin
for "swinging the lead," and it is the doctor's discreet way
of concluding that you are a malingerer, someone seeking a sick note to
take time off work.
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- These and other terms are part of a secret language,
indecipherable to outsiders, that doctors use with each other to convey
a truth that is otherwise unsayable, especially to the patient.
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- The slang can be cruel, insulting and highly inventive,
says Adam Fox, a specialist registrar at the Child Allergy Unit at St.
Mary's Hospital in London, who has put together a dictionary of the terms.
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- They include British emergency-room acronyms such as
UBI (for "Unexplained Beer Injury"), PAFO ("Pissed And Fell
Over") and ATFO ("Asked To F... Off"), not to mention Code
Brown, referring to a faecal incontinence emergency.
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- Then there is DBI, for "Dirtbag Index." This
is a formula which multiplies the number of tattoos on the patient's body
by the number of missing teeth to estimate the total of days he has gone
without a bath.
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- Relatives of patients on the critical list may blanche
if they knew what CTD, GPO or Rule of Five mean on their loved-one's records.
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- The first means "Circling The Drain", the second
signifies "Good for Parts Only" and "Rule of Five"
means that if more than five of the patient's orifices are obscured by
tubing, he has no chance.
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- A patient who is "giving the O-sign" is very
sick, lying with his mouth open. This is followed by the "Q-sign"
-- when the tongue hangs out of the mouth -- when the patient becomes terminal.
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- General practitioners may use LOBNH ("Lights On
But Nobody Home") or the impressively bogus Oligoneuronal to mean
someone who is thick.
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- But they also have a somewhat poetic option: "Pumpkin
positive", referring to the idea that the person's brain is so tiny
that a penlight shone into his mouth will make his empty head gleam like
a Halloween pumpkin.
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- If a doctor is stumped for what is wrong with his or
her patient, they may record GOK, for "God Only Knows."
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- As for genetic quirks or inbreeding, FLK means "Funny
Looking Kid" and NFN signifies "Normal For Norfolk," a rural
English county.
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- Fox says he has a list of more than 200 terms used by
medical practitioners in Britain but his collection shows that doctors
around the world make up their own versions.
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- In Brazil, for instance, physicians use the acronym PIMBA
for what can be translated as "swollen-footed, drunk, run-over beggar."
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- Fox agrees that some terms are offensive and even cause
confusion to other doctors who are not in the know.
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- But he asks at least for critics to understand the stress
that doctors face every day. And in any case, the colourful language is
under threat of dying out because of fears of lawsuits.
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- "The use of medical slang helps to depersonalise
the distress encountered in doctors' everyway working lives," Fox
told the British Medical Journal (BMJ) last year.
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- "It is a way of detaching and distancing oneself
from patients' distress through loss, grief, disease, dying and death.
Often someone else's pain is too much for us, so we cut off."
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- Copyright © 2003 Agence France Presse. All rights
reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority
of Agence France Presse.
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-
- Comment
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- From Sandra Belanger
- 8-24-3
-
- Hi Jeff,
-
- I had to laugh when I saw that thing on doctor's slang.
I am totally certain that they have nothing on paramedics. Burn and Return
- ambulance ride to and from radiation therapy. Crispy Critter - Fully
incinerated patient. We would frequently mark drive by shootings and the
results of drug deals gone bad, beaten up prostitutes, etc. as work related
incidents on the patient's charts.
-
- In my book about being a paramedic I state the following
regarding this kind of behavior:
- "To an outside observer this sense of humor would
seem vulgar and out of place. To those in the business of emergency medicine
it is simply insurance against insanity. When you spend 40 plus hours
a week whistling past the graveyard of your own mortality, while juggling
someone's life between your two hands, black humor is the last bulwark
against totally losing it."
-
- I thought that you might find this interesting. It isn't
just doctors who do this, and in some regards it is necessary in order
to maintain one's composure. Coming up with new and inventive things like
this also serves to bond you with your partner. I have some EXCELLENT
cartoons in this vein that were drawn by a fellow paramedic while working
in Oakland. The last year I worked there they had 170 murders.
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- In the face of that carnage, you are left with little
choice. I remember many mornings driving home from work after pulling
a twelve hour graveyard shift, screaming and screaming and pounding my
steering wheel to relieve the stress of being the last face that so many
people see on this earth. I am really glad that I don't have to be a paramedic
any more. I loved the job too much and it fed my disfunction too well.
I still crave it sometimes like some old drug addiction.
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- I know this sounds crazy, but if you know them well enough,
and get them drunk, most paramedics will admit that emergency medicine
is as addictive as crack.
-
- Regards,
- Sandra Belanger
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