Talk:List of medical abbreviations

Early threads
This page is full of improperly capitalized edit links -- I will have to go through it later. Any help would be greatly appreciated. --maveric149

Should acronyms such as AMA really go on this page? They're listed as American Medical Association etc but they could equally well be the Australian Medical Association. It seems a little umm overly specific to have them here - if we added the appropriate acronmyms for every country the list would be as long as my arm! IMO this list should stick to medical terminology, with a seperate one for medical organisations of various countries. ~ KJ

This page should be moved to: List of medical acronyms and abbreviations, as some of thease are no acronyms but are abbreviations, as an acronym makes a word eg POSH (Port Out Starbard Home) while an abbrevation does not made a word eg AD (Anno Dommini)..


 * I believe an acronym arising as an abbreviation is still an abbreviation. At any rate, the word "posh" did not arise as an abbreviation or acronym for "Port Outward Starboard Home".  You might do better with SCUBA, which really does stand for "Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus." –Dan Hoey 23:20, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

NOS stands for "Not Otherwise Specified" in many standardized clinical coding lexicons. ~Felinity

I see that someone has added FOOSH (Fall On OutStretched Hand) and someone else has removed it. It is a fairly standard acronym in the emergency departments where I have worked. I am unsure about if I should just add it back in. 139.168.206.220 22:12, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

FWIW, I believe that anything that might show up on a patient's chart is fair game for inclusion here. Also, "Resident's talk", which may not show on a chart, but much of which is designed to quickly convey essential information to their fellows. Pproctor 23:48, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Re: "Resident's talk", I notice here that PFO has got the Patent Foramen Ovale, but not the more common usage (Pissed and Fell Over) and there is no entry for TTFO. Should we be including the more scatological phrases? 139.168.206.220 22:14, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

I've done some cleanup, will do more later. Perel 10:57, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Interferon is also IFN. I've rarely seen it as INF except as a typo.121.45.133.144 06:35, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Specific queries
I've removed "UDDHS UNITED HEALTH DISCHARGE DATA SET", both as the word order does not follow the abbreviation letters, and I have no idea of wjhat the "united" applies to - is this a standard system in any particular country, or just a locally termed expression for a specific hospital (in which case not David Ruben Talk 12:16, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

The source on additions I (maryanninmiami) am making at this point are a list of medical abbreviations handed to nursing students at Keiser University. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Maryanninmiami (talk • contribs) 14:13, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Regarding Unnecessary Capitalization
One thing to be done in this list is to go through and Remove Some Of The Unnecessary Capitalization. I don't have time to really go over the whole thing, but this is a to-do item for anyone who can make time for it. Some recent edits have actually taken blue links and turned them red By Forcing Them To Have Capital Letters. Please note that the spell-outs (expansions) of acronyms and initialisms do not have to be capitalized, and the expanded terms are themselves Not Proper Nouns, which is why their article titles Do Not Use Title Case (WP:MOSCAP). Thanks. — ¾-10 17:59, 1 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Update: I have pecked away at them; more when have time. — ¾-10 19:20, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Too Long
This article is getting really long and hence very slow to load on dialup. Suggest splitting this article into multiple small chunks.sarindam7 (talk) 18:20, 14 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Done. — ¾-10 22:32, 17 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Thankyou59.93.207.119 (talk) 13:11, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Merge Proposal
Regarding the merging of List of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions into this article.
 * Disagree: Both articles are necessarily long, and the merge would make it unwieldy and less useful. MeekMark (talk) 11:49, 18 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Unsure, but some form of trimming is needed: List of medical abbreviations itself duplicates throughout the A-Z sections the prescription abbreviations then listed in its last section of List of medical abbreviations. So t.d.s. gets mentioned 3 times between these 2 articles. Some pruning is needed - either all merged into List of medical abbreviations but pull out of the A-Z lists items that are prescription latin abbreviations, or extract all of such info out of List of medical abbreviations and ensure single inclusion at List of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions. My twopence is for latter option. David Ruben Talk 15:08, 18 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I have continued to ponder this series of articles (med abbrev, Rx, Latin, DNU, acronyms in healthcare) since first posting, and my ideas have evolved to No merge, however, do split this article up by letter, and do tie the series together with a navbox. All while agreeing that all points discussed above are good and valid. The idea of weeding out duplicates between the separate lists (main vs Rx vs Latin) could work well in a traditional authoring environment, but for Wikipedia especially, it would require one of us to referee constantly to enforce it, because random users will continually be adding new abbrevs without knowing the plan. There's a tendency that when someone lands on any of these pages, (1) they expect to find any abbrev related to that topic, and (2) if it's not there, they'll add it. Given that principle, I don't think that we should fight duplication across the articles in the series (in the spirit of WP:NOTPAPER). Meanwhile what Sarindam7 said above at is also very true. But it is inevitable that any halfway-decently-complete list of medical abbreviations will inevitably be long (as MeekMark meant by "necessarily long"). (Which is why when you buy a reference book of med abbrevs, such as Sloane or Jablonski, it is several hundred pages long.) Therefore, what I propose is to give up the idea of preventing duplicates and instead make a series of manageable-length articles, where duplication of individual abbrevs between the main subseries (0-9 & A-Z) versus the Rx list and the Latin list is allowed. The landing page for the main subseries would be called something like " List of medical abbreviations: Overview ". Then, on that page, provide a short intro, and then have a navbox, similar to the currently existing TOC, but the difference being, instead of the TOC links jumping to an anchor on the same page, they link to separate pages, one for each letter of the alphabet. The navbox on page "M" would look like this:


 * The names of the separate pages are then of the form:


 * List of medical abbreviations: 0-9
 * List of medical abbreviations: A
 * List of medical abbreviations: B
 * List of medical abbreviations: C
 * etc.


 * — ¾-10 12:57, 8 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I have sandboxed the navbox template at User:Three-quarter-ten/Sandbox 1. — ¾-10 16:07, 8 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Resolved: There were no objections, so I implemented the plan. — ¾-10 22:26, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

EMT
Does EMT really stand only for Emergency Medical Technician. I think it stands also for Emergency Medical Transport. Am I right? What stand D5 and D50 an D5W for? (kind of a solution for infusion?) --84.137.13.82 (talk) 21:25, 22 March 2008 (UTC)


 * "Emergency medical technician" is the most common meaning, but no doubt that some institution somewhere also uses it to mean "emergency medical transport". Very common to have variations in usage such as that. D5 aka D5W is dextrose 5% in water. For more info see main article Intravenous therapy at Intravenous therapy. — ¾-10 13:06, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Page changed into a series with a navbox
Because the parent list was already too long, and still would have needed additional growth to be comprehensive, I split it into a series with a navbox (Template:MedAbbrev). — ¾-10 22:30, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

add EGBUS
EGBUS —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.151.240.70 (talk) 21:06, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Referencing
This article series should still be verifiable against reliable sources.

I cannot find reference to a few of the listed abbreviations - eg. BBMF "Bone break Me Fix" anywhere online. Is this article series an attractant for doctors and nurses playing WP:MADEUP?--ZayZayEM (talk) 04:39, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Request for additions
The following request for additions was moved from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Lists. Dkriegls (talk) 17:34, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

List of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions/ List of medical abbreviations: Latin abbreviations
Please consider adding

MDS = misce, da, signa (mix, give and sign)

Kind Regards, Karl-Stephan Neufeldt (Statistical Programmer karl-stephan.neufeldt@ucb.com) 195.206.74.130 (talk) 08:03, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Duplication
Why do both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronyms_in_healthcare and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_abbreviations? 86.166.164.39 (talk) 16:49, 9 September 2015 (UTC)


 * I think the original plan was that list of medical abbreviations is for biomedical terms (such as tissues, symptoms, and disorders) and that acronyms in healthcare is for the business-and-professional side (such as acronyms for organizations). However, it is true that that distinction is definitely not clearly conveyed by those titles. Perhaps the title of acronyms in healthcare would be better as acronyms in the healthcare industry? Quercus solaris (talk) 23:18, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Table style
Would like to see the table have faint grid lines, possibly faded alternating background colors in the rows. I'll try and look into styling a table. Mathglot (talk) 00:04, 10 October 2015 (UTC)


 * K, made a start with it. Top left header cell isn't correct bg color or bold captioned, not sure why not. I like the alt-row shading, but I think it's maybe two shades two dark; a very subtle bg color helps your eye line up the rows, but I think too dark is distracting.  I'm thinking maybe use "#f8ecf2" instead of "#e5d1cb;"&mdash;see last three shaded rows&mdash;what do you think? Mathglot (talk) 04:19, 10 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Switched to #f8ecf2. Microcurie has a lighter shade, as a further test. Mathglot (talk) 18:37, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

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Delete SI units?
The length of this list keeps coming up from the look of things. When I viewed this article, I wondered why we're including standard SI abbreviations and other terms that don't specifically relate to health care. Surely this can be found elsewhere (really, how many people accessing this list wouldn't already know that mL refers to millilitres, for example)? This makes up a significant proportion of this list, and seems unnecessary, unless non-standard abbreviations are used in medical contexts. Thoughts? DrMAV81 (talk) 04:58, 2 November 2019 (UTC)