Playing Detective at the Doctor's Office.

Billy stood in front of his English class nervously arranging his note cards, glancing at his watch, and clearing his throat. As class came to order, Billy started to deliver his speech. To his horror, his mouth had gone completely dry! What was going on?

Medically speaking, Billy was suffering from something called xerophobia. Sounds pretty dreadful, doesn't it? Did you ever wonder why diseases and medical problems seem to have the most ominous sounding names? Do doctors and scientists stay up nights trying to think of these awful titles to scare us? And why are the names so long? Before we call in a detective, let's take a closer look at the clues ourselves.

Believe it or not, no one really planned to make medical words difficult for us to understand. But most medical words are either Latin or Greek in origin so they really are, at least in part, a foreign language to us. Then various prefixes and suffixes are added to modify the meaning and to further define the Greek or Latin root. So, when you add two or three modifiers to an already strange sounding word, it becomes very long. Sometimes it takes several syllables to pin down exactly where things are located in the body, how serious a problem is, or just to name the problem itself.

It is possible to decode some of these medical monstrosities if you have some basic information. All you have to do is learn a few roots, prefixes, and suffixes and you can identify, at least in a general way, lots of medical terms.

Take, for instance, Billy's problem--xerophobia. Perhaps you've heard of a phobia. It's a rather common term that means a fear of something. There is claustrophobia, a fear of closed spaces; hydrophobia, a fear of water; and bacterophobia, a fear of bacteria. If we know that xero means dry and phobia means fear, we can figure out that Billy has a dry mouth because of his fear of speaking in front of his class. From there, if we know that the root derm means skin, we can figure out that xerodermia is dry skin!

By learning a few suffixes such as -itis, which means inflammation, or -ology, which means the study of something, we can add to our medical vocabulary by defining dermatitis, an inflammation of the skin, and dermatology, the study of the skin. You probably are aware of the fact that you have tonsils and an appendix. Given what we have already learned, what do you suppose is tonsillitis and appendicitis? If we know that -ectomy means cutting something out, we can define tonsillectomy, the result of repeated tonsillitis, and appendectomy, which is what happens to you if you have appendicitis. Can you guess what a lumpectomy is? What about an adenoidectomy? The removal of your adenoids if often done at the same time as a tonsillectomy.

It's fun playing detective when you learn just a few basic terms. Of course, some medical terms do not follow this neat little pattern and really do sound like gobbledygook. But the next time you hear your doctor say a word you don't recognize, listen carefully or ask him or her to write it down. Then see if you can become a medical detective and decipher its hidden meaning.