Medical language can sometimes stump patients. And some common sayings are straight-up head-scratchers.
Calling a patient’s neurological exam “grossly intact,” for example, might not sound so great, says Michael Pitt, a pediatrician at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis. But it actually means that everything is normal and working as expected.
In 2021, Pitt and his colleagues asked 215 adults at the Minnesota State Fair to decipher that language and 12 other medical sayings a patient might hear from a doctor or read in their notes. People can trip up on familiar words and phrases that have one meaning in everyday English and an entirely different meaning
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