Inappropriate and Confusing Electrocardiographic Terms

Confusing medical terms: disease that may or may not exist.

Patients often quote diseases or illnesses that either do not exist per se or are hard to prove that they exist. Often symptoms are vague and, therefore, difficult for patients to qualify in a language clinicians can understand, interpret and act upon. Physicians often perpetuate this by giving 'diagnoses of exclusion', or using poor explanations, oversimplifications, conflicting diagnostic cri...

Confusing cortical columns.

T he late developmental neurobiologist, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Victor Hamburger told me during one of our discussions about the distinction between boring data and exciting concepts, ‘‘one can spend an entire lifetime correcting a flawed paper published in reputable journal and still loose the battle if people like the basic idea’’ (V. Hamburger, personal communicatio...

Letter to the Editor: Use of some inappropriate terms in Spanish in Oral Medicine and Pathology.

According to the Dictionary of the Spanish Language of the Royal Spanish Academy (DLERAE) (1) anglicism refers to those words or terms of English language that are used in another. The Spanish language has acquired and uses numerous anglicisms, especially for words that have no option to be translated into Spanish, such as those absent in this language like internet, wifi, whisky, etc. In Medic...

Are troponins confusing?

Correspondence to: Dr P O Collinson, Department of Chemical Pathology, St George’s Hospital, London SW17 0QT, UK; paul.collinson@ stgeorges.nhs.uk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . T he ability to measure the cardiac specific markers, cardiac troponin T (cTnT) and cardiac troponin I (cTnI) (the cardiac troponins), has produced a paradigm shift in the assessment of patients with susp...

Colour-coded wristbands confusing.