The hospital near my house recently said they wouldn’t accept doctors test orders with abbreviations because they weren’t standardized and so caused too much confusion.
Per the canonical book, yes. Per Lynch’s film, IX was home to mentats.
This is probably going to sound reeaaallly stupid, but . . .
I always wondered why diagnosis was abbreviated “Dx” as well. Then I heard primary diagnoses referred to as, “differential diagnoses.” Then I remembered that with a function of x, the derivates of a function are dx/dt (or whatever it’s being differentiated with respect to), d2x/dt2 (sorry, don’t know how to do the correct coding), etc. When you take the derivative of a function, you are said to “differentiate” it. So I wondered if the two were related. Any insight?
Gestalt.
Ax =Assessment
Tx = Transfer (eg from bed to chair)
Well we’re getting closer to developing the AMA Phonetic Alphabet, but even with Jill’s Staff Report on Rx, we aren’t any closer to finding the origin of any of these abbreviations. We don’t even know if they were influenced by Rx, parallel developments, or totally unrelated. Are they recent coinages, or do they originate in medieval texts?
Jill’s Report suggests that Rx may have originated as an abbreviation for Latin recipe formed by placing a crossbar over the tail of the R. Were any of these abbreviations formed that way? Were any abbreviations formed this way?
Rx, what’s that?
Rx, not quite yet!
Rx always means therapy and much of the time, the therapy is pharmacologic, but may be physiologic or involve medical equipment.
So we Rx things like Digoxin for CHF or congestive heart failure. It would be written take one tablet by mouth before eating in the morning and 1/2 tablet in the evenings by mouth before eating.
Rx: Digoxin 500 mgs
Disp # 45 for 45 Days
. __
Sig: T po ac qAM & ss po.ac qPM
Or you could Rx: PT or OT or a CPAP
Ex is equipment not example which is eg
MobiusDick, MD, PhD
If a patient seeks treatment for erectile dysfunction, does that mean that they are asking for Tx for their Dx? Then the doctor tells them that they just need to stop Jx-ing so much. One time, a farmer got told that until he was willing to Nx the Ox Fx-ing, he would never have ordinary, satisfying Sx.
In my own medical records, I’ve likewise seen Bx, as used by psychologists, to mean behavior.
I’ve also seen Ox in my records, but I never figured out what it stands for. In the context, it certainly wasn’t referring to O[sub]2[/sub]. Do we have an answer for that yet?
It wasn’t an abbreviation. They thought you were an ox.
There’s also Zx, which refers to zombie threads
One more instance of a common language causing problems: As far as I know, none of these abbreviations are used or recognised over here. Doctor’s bad writing and ad hoc abbreviations have, however, been causing problems since they first started writing prescriptions.
If you use X instead of an I, it means that the cartoon character is dead.
I wx that px who reopen zx thx would just fx ox.
No connection really between the mathematical & the medical here.
A “differential diagnosis” is simply the process of deciding what the patient’s problem is by looking at the differences between normality, the patient’s current state, and the indicia of all the various diseases or injuries.
Imagine a tree-shaped flow chart starting with high level questions like: is patient breathing?, conscious, bleeding, etc. The asking more detailed questions about whatever. Finally getting down into microminutae about different blood test values or genetic factors. The process of working down the decision tree using the evidence of the patient is the process of differential diagnosis. In other words, discover the correct diagnosis by eliminating all the other diagnoses which have different parameters than your patient has.
In math of course, differentials are (simplifying mightily) about taking two nearby X values and their corresponding Y values then evaluating the ratio between X1-X2 (their difference) versus Y1-Y2 (their difference).
No connection really beyond the high-level meaning of the word difference as embodying some sort of comparison.