General Medical Terms
Common language used in healthcare, medical records, and conversations about health. Browse definitions and meanings below.
What counts as a general medical term?
Some vocabulary belongs to no single organ or specialty. Words such as acute, chronic, bilateral, benign and idiopathic describe how a condition behaves, where it sits, or how well it is understood, and they mean the same thing whether the subject is a heart, a kidney or a bone.
Abbreviations sit here too. Clinical notes compress heavily, and the same few letters can carry different meanings in different settings, so the expansion matters more than the letters themselves. Much of reading a note is knowing which vocabulary is general and which is specific.
Terms in this topic
Alphabetical order-
Pain and nothing more: an ending reporting a symptom the person feels, with no claim about what is causing it.
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A cutting out: the ending telling a reader that an operation removed something rather than merely opened or inspected it.
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Whatever the root names, this ending places it in the bloodstream or describes the state of the blood itself.
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The commonest ending in the whole vocabulary, and the one most often misread as proof that an infection is present.
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Tissue gone soft where it should be firm, a change visible on scans and under the microscope alike.
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An ending that records size and nothing else: the organ named in front of it is bigger than it should be.
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The branch of knowledge, not the person: one ending names the field and a slightly longer one names its practitioner.
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An abnormal state or an ongoing process, and the ending most often mistaken for a second word meaning inflammation.
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A syllable apart from removal and from a lasting opening, this ending means only that a structure was cut into.
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Disease of a named part, used when the process is known to be wrong but not known to be anything more specific.
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Surgery that rebuilds rather than removes, marking an operation whose whole purpose is shape and working function.
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A suffix from the surgeon's vocabulary: the structure named in front of it has been stitched back together with sutures.
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An ending that reports texture, not cause: the tissue named in front of it has become abnormally firm or scarred.
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Looking inside with an instrument, an act named separately from the instrument that does it and from any image recorded.
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The ending that reports a passage has been squeezed tighter, whether by scar, swelling, a growth or thickened valve leaflets.
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A type of monoclonal antibody used in cancer detection or therapy.
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A staging system for prostate cancer that uses ABCD.
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Clusters of abnormal tube-like glands in the lining of the colon and rectum.
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Reference ranges are constructed to exclude a slice of healthy people, so ordering enough tests makes an abnormal result close to inevitable.
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A system used to group human blood into different types, based on the presence or absence of certain markers on the surface of red blood cells.