There is a lot of logic-based content in medicine. Some things can be deduced by oneself, while others cannot be deduced, likely because some prerequisite knowledge is unknown. And that knowledge is often hidden in the terminology.
A Case Study of Prescription Jargon
For example, medication frequencies like qd, bid, tid, etc. At first, I thought the “t” in tid stood for “triple,” so tid meant three times a day. As for “id,” I didn’t know, and I had no desire to find out. But what about bid? It seems “b” is not equal to “double,” so the pattern I figured out couldn’t apply. Also, I couldn’t understand qd. No choice, I just wrote them down. They’re just three words anyway; even though I didn’t know the meanings, I remembered them after using them several times.
Later, one day during a shift, a teacher mentioned “qod” to me, a term I had never heard before. I later learned it means once every other day. When I checked, I found there were many such professional terms (industry jargon): Rx, pm, qhs, po, gtt, IV, etc. I couldn’t understand at all. Was I supposed to memorize all these? I could handle memorizing three, but so many would drive me crazy (I’m not good at rote memorization).
So I surfed the internet and found someone explaining that these abbreviations are actually Latin abbreviations in the English system. Some parts are similar to English, but many are different (I organized this content at 各种医嘱拉丁文缩写（bid、tid、IV等）的全称).
For example:
- qd actually stands for “quaque die,” meaning “every day”
- qh actually stands for “quaque hora,” meaning “every hour”
After reading these, I realized q means “every,” d means “day,” h means “hour.” Next, I immediately figured out that q3h = every 3 hours, and thus all q XXX h, q XXX d.
As for the confusing qod, it actually stands for “quaque altera die,” meaning “every other day.”
Later, when I encountered unfamiliar abbreviations, I opened this note, checked the Latin, then English, and after that, I could understand all the jargon instead of relying on rote memorization!
A Vitamin K Case Study
Another case: many people know vitamin K, but what does K stand for? Who cares?
Recently, when I was learning about coagulation, all tutorials emphasized the importance of vitamin K in the synthesis of FⅡ, FⅦ, FⅨ, and FⅩ, but few elaborated on why it’s so important. I didn’t understand and often forgot, easily confusing it with vitamin C, since vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy, which seems strongly related to coagulation.
Later, I watched a video and learned that vitamin K stands for “vitamin koagulation,” with “koagulation” being the German word for “coagulation.” When I heard this, I immediately connected the two points! With the explanation of the mechanism, I would never confuse it with vitamin C again.
The coagulation cascade takes place on the cell membrane surface. FⅣ is an adhesive used to link FⅡ, FⅦ, FⅨ, and FⅩ. Their glutamic acid residues have carboxyl groups which can bind calcium ions, thus anchoring them to the cell membrane surface to carry out the coagulation cascade.
Vitamin K is a cofactor for carboxylase. Warfarin inhibits epoxide reductase to prevent the generation of reduced vitamin K, causing FⅡ, FⅦ, FⅨ, and FⅩ to be unable to undergo carboxylation and thus unable to bind to FⅣ on the cell membrane, thereby inhibiting the reaction on the cell membrane surface.
Insights from These Two Cases
There are many more cases I won’t elaborate on here, but these cases illustrate one thing: many answers are hidden in the question itself. You might not immediately know why vitamin K is related to coagulation. But if you knew that the name itself includes the word “coagulation,” you would definitely remember the importance of vitamin K in coagulation.
Or put another way, many problems stem from just not knowing the English/Latin names. For example, at 非甾体抗炎药（解热镇痛药）Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs （NSAIDs）, I needed to solve the fourth problem:
These drugs give me a huge headache
- Treat many different diseases
- Numerous drug types
- The specific medication often could be this one or that one
- Each drug has a brand name, chemical name, and common name used simultaneously
Summary
The dominance of English/Latin in the medical field is an established fact. Facing this reality, being an ostrich and burying your head in the sand will only limit your thinking to a small space. As a professional, understanding, communicating, and even producing output with English gradually become essential.
On the contrary, when communicating with ordinary people or beginners, it is even more important to use understandable language, or even phonetic mnemonics and clever memory aids, to quickly grasp the overall picture.