Medical Transcription: What’s in it for you?
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Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Like dear, tragic Hamlet, we occasionally wretched and tragic MTs often see nothing but words, words, words in books. We have stacks of books that contain nothing but alphabetized words. There are no sentences, no paragraphs in these books…just words, words, words. They’re words that have to do with cardiology, orthopedics, surgery, OB/GYN, various bits and pieces and systems of the human body. The definitions of the words aren’t included in these books, just the words themselves.
Our job is to figure out which words are the right ones to use, and sometimes that isn’t easy because, once in a while, we can only hear part of a word. There are times when we can only hear the first syllable or even the first letter of a word. Sometimes we can’t hear the first syllable at all, just the last syllable. We know whose fault that is, but we aren’t here to discuss the dictating habits of doctors today; we’re here to talk about ways to figure out what the heck they’re whispering in our ears.
Of course, MTs have been doing this for decades upon decades, and they like to help each other out with various tricks of the trade, like this one from MT Daily, The Great Word List Project. I thought I’d post a link to it, see below, in case you haven’t run across it before. You can use * as a wildcard for the part of the word that you’re puzzling over. For instance, if you hear the dear doctor mumble “es_____ia,” you can type es*ia and come up with the following, and you can wing it from there:
• escherichia
• eschericia
• esocataphoria
• esophagalgia
• esophagectasia
• esophoria
• esotropia
• essentia
• esterapenia
• esthesiodermia
And here’s a link to this helpful little gadget with the really spiffy name:
“Though this be madness, yet there is a method in’t.”
