During Our Medical School years we roughly double our vocabulary and by graduation have learnt a new language. While we may try to revert to our mother tongue with patients, communication problems abound [1–3] often because patients do not understand the technical language of medicine. Australian writers have n called attention to the serious misunderstandings produced by the use of medical lingo across the Tasman [4,5]. Such problems of comprehension are likely to be aggravated, for patients j and doctors alike, by the current proliferation of medical acronyms [6] and euphemisms [7,8].
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