Lets try a new (I hope) theme:

Post an example of how patient's mis-hear what is said when giving them a diagnosis.

For example, I once incurred the wrath of a nice LOL (which in medicine means 'little old lady') when I told her that her back pain radiating into her leg was 'radicular' (meaning it radiates, following a nerve pattern). The CEO of the hospital asked me to apologize for calling her ridiculous!

An even better example (and still radically radicular...) is one mis-hearing or mis-pronunciation that has lead to an accepted medical diagnosis: shingles (for varicella-zoster, a painful viral inflammation of a nerve branch or two, almost always on one side and encircling the body). This neat (etymologically) word has nothing to do with the Latin root for the shingles atop your roof, which is scindere - meaning to split (for the way the old shingles were made split from a log). Instead, the medical term comes from a mis-hearing or saying of 'cingulus' (or cingulum) - Latin for 'girdle'. To 'gird' means to encircle as with a band (as does the zoster), so this makes perfect sense.

You tell the patient they have a cingulus, and they tell their neighbor "doc says I got the shingles"!

Most docs are aware of many of these examples, and I willing to bet some patients are as well - lets hear them!

Rm