We all have a slip of the tongue when it comes to pronouncing certain words. While patients often assume that doctors know every medical term inside out, it turns out that physicians and other healthcare workers sometimes struggle with the same tricky words we do. In an American-based physician group, several professionals shared their funniest mispronunciation moments.
One common mix-up involves LASIK, the well-known eye surgery. Some doctors accidentally call it Lasix, a completely different medication.
"LASIX is a medication not an eye surgery people!! It’s LASIK!"
And of course, someone jokingly replied:
"couldn’t it be Lasix if you get it in both eyes"
Some admitted their guilt:
"I'm personally guilty of this one and that's all I'll admit to!"
Another frequent error is confusing HIPAA, the health privacy law, with HIPPA.
"Every time I see a healthcare person write “HIPPA” I die a little."
Follow-ups were equally amusing:
"they haven’t had enough mandatory HIPAA training videos... I’m snitching to HR"
Many confuse stents, a small mesh tube typically used to hold open passages in the body, such as weak or narrowed blood vessels, with a stint, a fixed period of time that you spend doing something.
"Patient had a “STINT” put in"
A urologist admitted:
"OMG that one drives me crazy... so I have to suffer in silence so frequently!"
Regional accents sometimes make this worse. In Texas, “stent” and “stint” sound nearly identical, while elsewhere it’s considered a clear mistake.
"That’s a regional thing. My mom is from Philly and she pronounces the words merry marry and Mary differently. I say all 3 the same. I’m from Texas. Same for pen and pin. I can hear the differences but I don’t say them differently. Same for stent and stint."
Even drug names are tricky. Fentanyl often gets mispronounced as Fentanol:
"I'm so damn sick of hearing everyone call it Fentan-alllllll"
The group largely agreed:
"It makes my skin crawl when I hear that."
"Almost no one says it correctly anymore."
Some other hilarious examples include:
Prostrate instead of prostate
Learnex instead of larynx
Barbiturates pronounced as Bar-beh-ture-ates or Bar-bitch-u-its
Mediastinal pronounced as Mee dee ah stinuhl
Pharynx pronounced as phar-nix
Writing heroine when they mean heroin
Erythromycin pronounced with an extra “A”: erythro-MIA-cin
Even spelling can trip up professionals. One admitted:
"I spelled codeine wrong for 30 years until I saw it on the EHR even then I thought they misspelled it."
Another shared:
"I was spelling ibuprofen wrong for 20 years until our EMR got spell check. I'm a pediatrician... So, like 80% of my notes....."
