My dad took a lot of pills every day. I don’t take any prescribed medicine at all, but I imagine that as I move from middle age into old age I will be gradually prescribed more and more. This phenomenon is known as “escalating polypharmacy” and this Telegraph article asks whether it does more harm than good.
Category Archives: medical
21 medical words of the day
I found a cheap paperback medical dictionary and enjoyed browsing through it (as you do) – so many useful words! (Many of them direct from classical languages, and some of them hard to find online.) Here’s a selection:
1. bex: cough
2. dejecta: shit
3. oula, ouloid: scar, scarlike – the normal spelling seems to be “uloid”
4. theism: tea-poisoning
5. thelium: tit
6. maidism: pellagra
7. madescent: moist
8. meatus: bodily opening
9. abionarce: fatigue
10. obdormition: when an arm or leg “falls asleep”
11. oniomania: shopaholism
12. mastauxe: breast enlargement
13. unipara: a woman with one kid
14. xysma: bits of gut in your poo
15. roborant: a pick-me-up
16. roust: nurse’s assistant
17. psellism: stutter
18. ptarmus: sneezing
19. pygal: on the bum
20. ochlesis: sickness due to overcrowding
21. parateresiomania: an obsession with seeing new things
Dadge 