Medical terminology?

Question

what is the relationship between learning medical terminology and learning medicine? can you do one without the other?

Answer 1

No way.

To learn medicine you must know medical terminology. You can't go around telling someone they have "belly pain" you have to be more specific - gastric, pelvic, hepatic, ect.

That is medicine.

Answer 2

I hear you! Medical terms are hard to remember along with medicine. Generally, as you learn medicine - you start to learn the medical terminology as you go, this may often mean that you may not know what a lot of terms means for a few years, then after studying - you'll be like 'oh' that person's isnt breathing well despite high O2, his monitor says CO2 is high (carbon dioxide) - prehaps he is in Type 2 resp failiure, (hypercarbic) which means increased CO2.  So yeah, basiclly you learn the medicine, then you learn the terms, and they all become part of the same, yet bigger picture.

Hope this helps.

Incidentally, if you learn only medical terms without the medicine, people often confuse terminology, cos its clinical application differs sometimes.

Answer 3

they pretty much go hand in hand. you need to learn the terminology.  breaking down a medical term into it's smaller parts can tell you what a person is suffering from.