| Summary: The Dictionary of Medical Acronyms and Abbreviations is also known as the DMAA. Whether you need to figure out medical abbreviations because you are a new clinician, a patient, or a fan of General Hospital, the Dictionary of Medical Acronyms and Abbreviations is the book you need! |
“Nurse, start him on a 20 cc/hr IV of lipids. He’s NPO.” For many in the medical field, this makes perfect sense. Most of us can even understand everything in the first sentence, but the abbreviation “NPO” is likely to flummox people without a background in the medical field. This is a time when it would be handy to have the Dictionary of Medical Acronyms and Abbreviations handy. Sometimes, when a loved one is in the hospital, the constant flurry of medical abbreviations becomes numbing, and can make people feel as if they don’t know what’s going on. In a case like that above, it would be easy for a person to look up “NPO” in the dictionary and discover that it simply means “Nothing Per Oral,” or no food by mouth.
Of course, the dictionary itself is not designed for the casual user. It’s really designed for medical professionals who have to deal with abbreviations constantly. It’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the new abbreviations entering the medical field. Each new virus, drug, and piece of equipment, it seems, has its own set of acronyms, and a nurse or doctor can easily be blindsided by a new abbreviation.
To solve that problem, Stanley Jablonski, a distinguished indexer for the National Library of Medicine, took it upon himself to create the Dictionary of Medical Acronyms and Abbreviations, and during his lifetime, edited five editions of the book. The latest edition, the sixth, includes over 55,000 terms, almost 10,000 of them brand new. The new abbreviations come from recent clinical trials, changes in virus nomenclature, and the relatively new field of medical informatics. Medical informatics is the area of medicine specializing in the use of computers to manage information and patient care.
Like most abbreviation dictionaries, the DMAA does not include definitions. There is simply no room to do that and keep the dictionary portable. Therefore, if a doctor looks up the acronym “SS” and finds that it means “Sjoegren’s Syndrome,” he will not find a description of the condition, but he will at least know where to look to find more information.
One very handy feature of this book is the inclusion of the searchable text on CD-ROM. Since much of a doctor’s documentation work is now done on computers, having the dictionary easily accessible on the computer is a very useful thing. In addition, a version is also available for handheld computers, which doctors are now carrying with increasing frequency.
Though geared toward medical professionals, this dictionary is a worthwhile purchase for people who have any prolonged exposure to medical abbreviations. Doctors, nurses, insurance claim processors, and even people with chronic illnesses can benefit from the information in Jablonski’s dictionary.
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