Catchy Name Needed

exophthalamos
protrusion of the eyeballs, as seen in Graves disease


Did you know there was a fancy medical name for this? I didn't. (Not that I'm surprised, really, but still....)

I finished going through the chapter on the endocrine system yesterday and now I'm starting the nervous system - they're both on the same test and I noticed that the average grade on this test is lower than most. Now that I've read the endocrine chapter I'm not surprised - there's a lot to remember. Lots of endocrine glands, a couple of which I've never even heard of (parathyroid? really?) and some of the glands secrete six or seven different hormones. I'm sure they won't really expect us to have all of that memorized, but I'd like to at least have some clue about it!



A couple of links, one medical and one not:

Really fascinating article about how Apgar scores for babies came to be. (I'm never 100% sure about whether you can see some of these without a login - tell me if you have trouble!)

Tangential to the Sotomayor nomination, here's drdenny about the "mainstream" and how the political parties are fighting for possession of that rhetorical territory.

Heberden nodes
small, hard nodules formed in the cartilage of the distal joints of the fingers in osteoarthritis


I've finished working my way through the chapters on the muscles and skeleton in the Medical Terminology book, but there's no way I'm ready to take the test right now (I nearly said "take the quest" - too much MMORPGing!) so I'm working my way through the same chapters in the Anatomy book now, hoping that will help. It's all straightened itself out in my head a lot, but not everything has stuck yet, so it needs some more work. I'm not having any more trouble with the names of muscles and bones than I am with with names of diseases. Things like the difference between all the different forms of bone cancer were stumping me until I finally spotted a pattern - if it's just "-oma" it's not so bad, but if it's "-sarcoma" look out. So an osteoma is benign and so is a chondroma (which is in the cartilage) or even an osteochondroma (both bone and cartilage), but an osteosarcoma is malignant. This doesn't always work for other cancers (myeloma, for example) but it seems to for this bunch.


(I know the icon is awfully busy but I like it. At least it doesn't actually blink.)

cryptorchidism
failure of the testis to descend into the scrotum

Now, I don't know about you, but "cryptorchidism" sounds to me like it might have something to do with funerals, but apparently "crypt" (like "occult") actually means "hidden" - which I didn't know - and "orchid" is the medical term for a testis, apparently due to its resemblance to an orchid root, so what you actually get is a fancy name for undescended testes. Go figure.

Or maybe it's the other way around, actually, and orchids were named because their roots look like testes? That's what the etymology site seems to be implying. That's even weirder, when you think about it.


(Some of you may be glad when I finish the internal organs and stop talking about guts and pelvic things. One more chapter - female reproduction - and I will mostly be done, at least until I get to all that same stuff again in anatomy.)

(Because it's just too much of a mouthful to pass up:)

glomerulonephritis
Inflammation of the kidney primarily involving the glomeruli. Occurs in both acute and chronic forms.

I don't know about you but this definition is not enlightening me too much, since I don't know what glomeruli are. I have been checking into this and they seem to be capillaries that serve some sort of purpose involving filtration.


You may can tell that I haven't started the kidney/urinary chapter full-bore just yet. I am more or less ready to go with it tomorrow; I took both the first anatomy test and the latest medical terminology test today and made a 92 and a 98 respectively. The anatomy test had much harder questions but there were fewer of them so I guess it evens out. The medical terminology test was on respiration and digestion; next we're onto the urinary tract (thus the choice of vocabulary term) and then the male reproductive system. Should be interesting. I think in Anatomy it's going to be the integumentary system next: the skin. They go in different orders but will have to start overlapping at some point!

columbina  is confused about the class business, and if he is, I figure somebody else is too, so let me clarify. I'm now taking two, count 'em, two classes:
1. Medical Terminology - I'm about halfway through this one.
2. Anatomy - I'm just starting this one.

They're both online, and there's a lot of overlap between the two, which is good - not only because it makes it easier, but because there's a heck of a lot of new material (to me, anyway) contained therein, so by the time I go over a lot of it twice I'm more likely to actually remember it.

Col and I also spent a bunch of WoW time, between fights, geeking out over vocabulary. Here's one bit I've been having trouble with that I was telling him about, and I'll repeat it all again because the more times I repeat it the more likely I am to remember it, and there are still a couple of these that I tend to forget. Some you'll know, some you probably won't unless you have a background in this stuff.

Suffixes for surgery:
-centesis - puncture, tap (like amniocentesis)
-desis - binding, fusion
-ectomy - excision, surgical removal
-pexy - surgical fixation
-plasty - reconstruction, plastic repair
-rhaphy - surgical repair, suture
-stomy - surgical creation of an opening (colostomy is probably the most common)
-tome - instrument for cutting (incising)
-tomy - incision
-tripsy - crushing (as in a gallstone; lithotripsy is a general term for crushing of a stone)

(Maybe later I'll tell you about the intestines. Right now I'm not in the mood for the ick factor of that one.)

Here is how I study. This class I'm taking now is "online" - mostly meaning that the tests are online and you do all your studying out of the book. So I've had to adjust the way I finally learned to study in college, which was to take notes as fast as I could write in class (I had a whole system of abbreviations, as I recall, although I couldn't tell you what they were any more) and then I would come home and REwrite them in understandable English - preferably soon after class before I forgot what all the abbreviations meant. As time went on I decided that the writing and rewriting process was where my brain learned things best, so that became a definite part of my routine - at least when I had time to do all of that. So what I'm doing now for medical terminology is pretty similar, except just that there is no initial lecture to take notes on, I just have to take notes out of the book, lots of them. Lots as in, I've filled up two (smallish) notebooks already and am starting on #3. Then I take all the definitions that I've copied down and put them into an Excel spreadsheet - can you get any geekier? - it has four or five tabs - words, roots, prefixes, suffixes, and terms (meaning technical terms and abbreviations and other stuff that doesn't fit well elsewhere). I will have a nice little mini-medical dictionary when I'm done. The rest of the notes I've been putting into OneNote when I get around to it. That doesn't seem as helpful as the definitions part, though.

The chapter on the lungs has turned out to be easier, much easier than the last one, which makes sense since they did say that last test was the hardest one. The chapter on blood had a lot of concepts that were pretty much new to me, like many types of blood cells, not just red and white but broken down into a whole bunch of subcategories, like granular and agranular leukocytes, eosinophils, basophils, neutrophils. It was quite a lot of stuff to take in. The lungs are easier because everybody's had some kind of lung disease in their life - colds, flu, vaccines for pertussis and diphtheria - and the flu - TB tests - and then there's bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma.... you may not have had all of those but you know people who have! And you see those drug commercials on TV all the time for drugs for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease - aka COPD - and asthma and some of these others, too. Respiratory diseases are just much more a part of people's normal lives than some of this other stuff, much as we may wish they weren't.