nancyk is right about pruritis. I knew that too, showing that you don't need an MD to translate the everyday into the arcane. A nurse can be just as unclear and exclusionary in her communication (nurse nancy, perhaps?).

A patient once asked me to stop using "necrotic" when talking to a student about her infected foot, when "dead" was what I really meant. Seems that the patients are on to us; we use language to obfuscate, to separate ourselves from the patient, to priviledge our communication. Sometimes they figure us out.