Medicalese: A Humorous Medical Dictionary

An irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, fun look at everyone and everything in medicine (from patients to nurses to doctors).

When your patient load seems more than you can manage and you're ready to become an ER patient yourself open this book because humor really is the best medicine to relieve stress! This 84 page paperback is filled with wacky definitions and cartoons sure to bring back a smile. Here are a just a few examples:

• Aaaah...- 1) What the doctor tells the patient to say before gagging the patient to the max. 2) Word preceding expletive when one receives the medical bill.

• Acquired Anencephaly- Anencephaly means "Without a brain." Acquired Anencephaly means a person is acting as if he/she is brainless. This condition is often found in hospital administrators.

• Admitting Receptionist- Personnel trained to smile pleasantly while extracting promissory notes, future inheritances, gold fillings, etc., from patients prior to allowing them admission to the hospital. In the Emergency Department, admitting receptionists make sure that multiple redundant forms full of obscure and irrelevant information are filled out in triplicate before treatment is begun.

• CPR (Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation)- really stands for "Cracking Patient's Ribs," when the chest and ribs are repeatedly squashed in an attempt to wake a patient up.

• Dietitian- person responsible for making sure that food reaching patients is without salt / sugar / fat / carbohydrates / calories, and is cold / soggy / unpalatable / tasteless. Dietitians strive to ensure that hospital food has the consistency and taste of Play-Dough.

• G.O.K.- sophisticated diagnosis made on extremely difficult cases. Stands for "God Only Knows!"

• Medicalese-Medical gibberish talk, which mainly consists of using more and bigger words in place of fewer and smaller words, in order to sound mysterious and impressive.

• Midwife-doctor's second wife, coming after the first wife (who was dumped after putting the doctor through long years of schooling), and before the last wife (the young pretty thing the doctor marries in his declining, senile years).

• Pharmacist-highly-trained professional who spent five years in college learning how to read doctors' prescriptions and count pills from a big bottle into a little bottle.

• Radiologist-doctor who prefers to deal with pictures of people rather than the people themselves.

• Wallet Biopsy -most important procedure done in the hospital, whereby all dirty green paper and loose silver is extracted from the leather object in a patient's pocket or purse.