Doctor slang is a dying art

BBC News On Line ^ | August 18m 2003 | Unsigned

[July 4th]

Very funny...thanks.

[Thane_Banquo]

I used to work at a nursing home. We used the term celestial discharge when someone croaked.

[maxwell]

Brings to mind Shem's classic, The House of God... A long-time favorite of mine.

GOMER: Get Out of My Emergency Room

[secret garden]

And the infamous GOMER index passed around to med students.

[Billthedrill]

...one doctor who had scribbled TTFO - an expletive expression roughly translated as "Told To Go Away" - on a patient's notes.

No, no, this isn't right - "Go" starts with a "G", not an "F," and "Away" starts with an "A," so "FO" couldn't possibly be...uh...oh. Never mind.

[Paleo Conservative]

DBI refers to "Dirt Bag Index", and multiplies the number of tattoos with the number of missing teeth to give an estimate of the number of days since the patient last bathed.

[Wright is right!]

I especially like Departure Lounge, but I'd apply it to all senior assisted-care facilities instead of just a hospital's geriatric ward.

Since this guy's a Brit, most of his work involves the slang of the UK. You can bet a similar survey here in the US would be extra enlightening.

Michael

[Slip18]

Thanks! That is hysterical. Well, maybe not to a patient.

[maxwell]

"Gomer" is the only one I can remember... I think there was one along the lines of "little old lady in no apparent distress", and there was "turfing", in which one got rid of one's patient by transferring him/her to another department... Now I want to re-read that book.

[AppyPappy]

When I worked at EMS, we had "Slug Calls" which were calls to take invalid patients from rest homes to offices. There was also:

Injury by Cop - every wino you treated was "beaten by a cop". They were usually fighting with each other but they thought they would get better treatment. When we heard "injury by cop", we knew it was a wino.
Legally Dead - Winos who blew over the death limit.
Bagged - dead as in "This one needs to be bagged"
Tagged - take to the morgue rather than ER
Butner - named for the funny farm in NC. Crazy. "Mr Butner needs transportation". They were frequently violent.

[LurkedLongEnough]

Reminds me of a sonogram to look at an unborn child. The woman had asked the doctor not to tell the gender of the baby.

So the doctor takes a look at the image and says to the radiographer, "looks like an XY".

The woman and her husband said, "Then it's a boy?", which flabbergasted the doctor so much, it was a riot.

[Dudoight]

PPP=piss poor protoplasm

[ChewedGum]

UBI - Unexplained Beer Injury

There has been a rash of these posted on FR this summer.

Gum

[dighton]

Great stuff.

Pumpkin Positive.

[Mad Dawg]

When I was a hospital chaplain in the 70's, FLK meant Funny Looking Kid -- usually a gloomy statement.

In a wonderful example of euphemism being frustrated, when patients died they were moved to the morgue on Alan Street, so the entry in the record was Alan Street House - which, when computerized, was abbreviated to ASH.

[Fudd]

Had me laughing. And reminded me of when I volunteered at an ER while in High School. We had people come in with their charts marked SOB on a regular basis (shortness of breath).

[stainlessbanner]

Knife And Gun Club = Inner-city hospital

FLK = Funny-Looking Kid

[IncPen]

Must see...

UBI - Unexplained Beer Injury

Semper ubi sub ubi: Always wear underwear...

[dighton]

UBI alert.