Stupid Medical Acronyms

This morning while eating breakfast I was watching the Today show for a few minutes. They were interviewing a doctor who was discussing a disorder called BDD, short for Body Dismorphic Disorder. Apparently it has similar characteristics to OCD and can be treated with either AD drugs or by administering CBT.

Never mind what these terms mean, I’m beginning to think that the medical profession has totally eclipsed the military in the use of acronyms. Long revered as the master chef of acronyms for cooking up 3, 4, even 5-letter acronyms designed to speed up communications, the military may have met their match in the medical industry.

The problem is that the ad agencies are seeing this as a goldmine. When a new commercial comes on that introduces yet another SA (stupid acronym) for some condition that is either so obscure or so common that it doesn’t even warrant an acronym, I just get really annoyed. My instinct is to TOTS (turn off the sound) or SC (switch channels). It also reinforces my respect for my PVR and adds yet another reason to record everything and watch it later BTC (bypassing the commercials).

What happens is that what was meant to be a shorthand form of communication becomes a form of code that burdens the listener with trying to decode the conversation. Miss one acronym and the whole conversation can either get way off track or the listener is forced to interrupt for clarification.

I worked for many years at Mattel where exactly the same thing was happening. In the early days the list of commonly used acronyms was fairly short, maybe 20 or so. By the time I left, there was a ten page book that was informally given to new employees that explained the hundreds and hundreds of different shorthand codes that filled almost every conversation and e-mail. New employees were at a loss to figure out the gist of the conversation, especially when the same acronym was used in different contexts. What was meant to save time quickly became a handicap.

I think this is expecially true of the medical acronyms. Since they are often formed from scientific terms that don’t usually find their way into our spoken vocabulary, people sometimes know what the acronym means without knowing what the letters actually stand for.

More often they are simply interpreted as gibberish, designed to make the speaker seem more educated or more sopisticated. They become a tool for pretentious people and a goldmine for ad agencies.

Of course, they have infiltrated every aspect of our lives; you can’t escape them.

ROM, RAM, USB, DSL, IBS, ED, MS, OCD, ADD, BDD, DDT, SBC, QVC, HP, MS, LAX, OC, LA, JFK, ABC, NBC, CBS, JPG, MP3, TLC, WTF.

In case you are stumped by any of these handy shortcuts that save us so much time, you can simply punch in this website and try to find out what the combinations of letters mean. There are about 2.5 million acronyms in the database so far. Clearly we need some sort of AAT (automatic acronym translator) that lurks in the background of our computers and suggests what the combination of letters might mean, in context of course.

One scary thought: We all know how foreign words quickly get assimilated into our vocabulary. What happens when the acronyms are made up of a combination of English and French or Swahili and Chinese? I seriously need to get on the list for a brain transplant with an AAT feature, among other things.