Medical Terminology For Dummies. Beverley Henderson

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      ✔ DNA advancement

      ✔ Hundreds of new drugs on the market

      ✔ Investigative and diagnostic medicine

      ✔ Joint replacements and other surgical procedures

      ✔ Laparoscopic surgeries

      ✔ MRIs

      ✔ Organ transplants

      ✔ Stem-cell research

      Today medical terminology is used and needed in any occupation that is remotely related to medicine and the normal functioning of the body. Here are a few careers involving the need for medical terminology:

      All these applications exist in addition to the obvious groups of healthcare professionals who use terminology in their day-to-day activities, including associates, the medical secretary in a doctor’s office, the insurance claims adjuster, even the compensation board adjudicator.

      Chapter 3

      Introducing the Big Three: Prefixes, Roots, and Suffixes

       In This Chapter

      Introducing the starting lineup for your medical terminology team! Whether you realize it or not, most words are made up of individual parts that contribute their own meaning. The big three – roots, prefixes, and suffixes – of medical terms all work together to clue you in to what that word means. Often, they tell you where it comes from, too.

      Starting at center, you have the root. The root is the main part of the word, telling you in general the thing you are dealing with. The word root specifies the body part.

      Playing forward is the prefix. A prefix appears at the beginning of a word and tells you more about the circumstances surrounding the meaning of the word.

      The suffix would be the goalkeeper, to really stretch this metaphor. The suffix is always at the end of a word and, in the medical world, usually indicates a procedure, a condition, or a disease.

      Almost every medical term can be broken down into some combination of prefixes, roots, and suffixes. Because they are the core of a word’s meaning, the root words are great in number. There are many more roots than prefixes and suffixes put together.

       Rooting Around for Answers

      So what makes the root of a word so darned important? Maybe it’s because the root lights the way to understanding the body system in question. The combining form, or word root, specifies the body part the word is either describing or associated with. Just by doing that, it helps rule out hundreds of other possibilities, allowing you to think only about a specific set of body parameters. This section shows two big lists of all the important roots that can appear after any prefix or before any suffix. They divide into two categories: exterior root words, which describe the exterior of the body, and interior root words, which deal with – you guessed it – the inside. These are the big daddies, the glue that holds all medical terms together. Think of this section as one-stop shopping. If you can’t find your root word here, you won’t find it anywhere! We will not be undersold!

       Exterior root words

      Table 3-1 lists the root words and combining forms that pertain to the exterior of the body.

Table 3-1 Your Fabulous Façade: Exterior Root Words

      Copycats and opposites

      Some prefixes might look very different but have the same meaning. Here are some examples:

      ✔ Anti- and contra- mean against.

      ✔ Dys- and mal- mean bad or painful.

      ✔ Hyper-, supra-, and epi- all mean above.

      ✔ Hypo-, sub-, and infra- all mean below.

      ✔ Intra- and endo- mean within.

      However, other, more troublesome prefixes mean the opposite of each other even though they look or sound similar. These are contentious prefixes:

      ✔ Ab- means away from (abduct), but ad- means toward.

      ✔ Ante-, pre-, and pro- mean before, but post- means after.

      ✔ Hyper-, supra-, and epi- mean above, but hypo-, infra-, and sub- mean below.

      ✔ Macro- means large, while micro- means small.

      ✔ Tachy- means fast, but brady- means slow.

      ✔ Hyper- also means excessive, yet hypo- also means deficient.

       Interior root words

      Now it’s time to meet the movers and shakers that best define your inner self. Table 3-2 lists the root words and combining forms associated with the body’s interior workings.

Table 3-2 Beautiful on the Inside: Interior Root Words

      It’s just semantics

      It is only appropriate, then, that you take a moment to digest what exactly is meant by the word semantics. Semantics is, quite simply, the study of meaning in communication.

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