Scientific Terminology and Communication
Scientific Terminology and Communication checks whether you can decode medical words from their roots and write precise scientific English. Lebanese candidates often handle the vocabulary but lose marks on units, abbreviation conventions and French-influenced false friends.
Core rules
- Roots: cardi- (heart), hepat- (liver), nephr- (kidney), pulmon- (lung), gastr- (stomach), neur- (nerve), oste- (bone), derm- (skin), cyt- (cell), hem(at)- (blood).
- Prefixes: tachy- fast, brady- slow, hyper- above, hypo- below, dys- disordered, a-/an- absent, poly- many, oligo- few, intra- within, inter- between, sub- below, supra- above.
- Suffixes: -itis inflammation, -osis degenerative or abnormal condition, -ectomy removal, -otomy incision, -ostomy opening, -emia blood condition, -uria urine condition, -megaly enlargement, -penia deficiency.
- Reporting: SI units, consistent significant figures, precision (repeatability) distinguished from accuracy (closeness to truth).
- IMRaD structure: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion; cite sources to avoid plagiarism.
Worked example
Decode “hepatosplenomegaly” and “tachyarrhythmia”. Hepat- + splen- + -megaly = enlargement of liver and spleen. Tachy- + arrhythmia = an abnormally fast rhythm, where a- (without) + rhythm + -ia indicates loss of normal rhythm. Both terms show the build order: prefix, then root(s), then suffix, with the suffix determining the grammatical class.
Traps
- Mixing -otomy (cut into) with -ostomy (create a stoma) and -ectomy (remove).
- French false friends: “actuellement” means currently, not actually; “librairie” is a bookshop, not a library; “sensible” means sensitive.
- Writing “e.g.” when listing the complete set (that is “i.e.”).
- Dropping units or mixing mg/dL with mmol/L in reported values.