Your Weird Medical Diagnosis
The Word: Fascinoma
Example: “Where are all the medical students? I have to
show them my fascinoma!”
Who Uses It: interns/brown-nosing residents/doctors over 60
No one wants to be a
“fascinoma.” The word, which is constructed from the adjective “fascinating”
plus the Greek suffix “-oma,” for a tumour or growth, suggests you have
something your doctor has never seen before.
A condition they have only
read about in books, or an exotic infection from your vacation in the tropics.
The first thing the doctor will do, after declaring you a fascinoma, is parade
every white coat in the building by your bed — ostensibly so they’ll know what
to look for next time, but actually to preen over their diagnostic coup.
Like any slang, the word
distances the person who knows it (the doctor) from the person who doesn’t (the
fascinoma himself). “It’s an in-crowd way of saying something is interesting,”
says Dr. Rita Charon, who edits the journal Literature and Medicine. The
instinct to translate conversations into medicalese has created other coinages,
such as “incidentaloma,” which refers to something you weren’t looking for but
stumbled on in an exam.
Solving a fascinoma is a
good way to impress the higher-ups and advance your career. But the desire to
stand out can lead eager young doctors astray. That’s why greenhorns learn the
popular maxim, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras,” meaning
that the answer is probably the most common pathology that fits the symptoms,
not the most bizarre. No one wants to be a fascinoma, but every rising medical
star wants to be the first to see one.
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