hey everybody this video is a very brief introduction to medical terminology medical terminology if you've never studied it before can seem really intimidating really complicated you thought I could never succeeded that I could just can never do that this video is for you and the analogy I'm going to use here is a train so I'm not a great artist I'm not good at drawing so I just drew a train here to illustrate the point that with medical terminology it's all about breaking it down just like railroad cars on a train it's all about breaking it down into its parts even the most complicated medical term can be broken down into the pieces that make it up and when you do that it's a lot easier to understand it so that's kind of what we're going to learn to do in this video so I'm not actually going to start in front of the Train I'm going to start in the middle of the Train with this blue car here because this is kind of a key player in the medical term that you're trying to translate and figure out what it means so this middle part is called the word route now it's not a word itself it's kind of a fragment but it's the foundation of what that whole term is trying to say so we start with the word root it is the foundation of the term there's at least one word root in every medical term sometimes there is more than one but we'll get into that a little later and the word root usually refers to a body part not always but usually so let's look at some examples of a word root let's look at this and we said they're fragments right and here's one that certainly looks like a fragment Arthur Oh Arthur oh it just sounds like some nonsense but it actually means joint the word you're probably most familiar with is arthritis which is about joints that word root that root arthri is referring to joint let's look at this one the word root is kardi and the means heart like cardiac cardio heart let's look at this one Dermot Dermot anytime you see that anywhere in a medical term you'll know that we're talking about skin the skin think of dermatology Dermott there's that part of it and here's another one another example he Matt or him and when you see that in a word you know it's talking about blood blood so I put a little dash at the end of these words just to indicate that they're fragments this is not a whole word these are just fragments they help us to understand what the whole term is trying to say so that's the word root so the word root is the key ingredient for what we're trying to figure out with this with this medical term the next segment or railroad car that we're going to look at when we're building our medical term is called the suffix and the suffix refers to something at the end at the end of a word or a phrase my brother was named after my dad so his name is exactly the same except at the end he's junior and so whenever he fills out forms official forms where they ask for your full name it says first name middle name last name and suffix and he has to put junior right because that's at the end so suffix just means it's at the end and a lot of medical terms they are made up of nothing but a word root and a suffix and that's all it takes to get the information across so a suffix helps to clarify what the medical term is talking about and all medical terms will have a suffix sometimes they're very exciting suffixes and sometimes they're very boring just to sort of wrap the word up but every medical term is going to have a suffix so if you've been looking at our train here you see we've got our word route you see we've got our suffix that's fine but you'll see something's kind of missing yeah there's a problem our word route and our suffix well they're not connected we need a connector to connect our railroad cars and so in this case it's a vowel and your medical terminology textbook we'll probably call it a combining vowel and it's literally just that about a e IOU it's just that and it helps to give the word flow make it more smooth and the way it usually appears in medical terminology textbooks is it appears with a slash so it will be slash a slash a slash I etc so that's our combining valve so we go back to our word root that we were reviewing just a minute ago this arthri and cardi and dermat and he met the way you'll see it in your textbook with a combining vowel is with the slash and then the vowel so in this case it's our throw cardio Dermott o and hamato so that's just a combining Val you can think of it as the connector for our railroad cars and that looks much better that looks like it might be getting somewhere so now let's go back to our suffix let's look at some examples of a suffix one that you probably already know is itis anytime you see that suffix on the end of a word it means inflammation you know we said our thourough means joint we add this suffix on the end of it arthritis there you go that's how you figure all of that out so itís anywhere you see it is inflammation arthritis tonsillitis appendicitis itis is inflammation let's look at ectomy it means surgical removal the fancy word for surgical removal is excision so anytime you see the suffix ectomy you know that someone is going to do surgery and take that out whether it's a tonsillectomy or an appendectomy we're cutting something and taking it out of the body let's look at another suffix urea urea think about how it sounds urea it almost sounds a little bit like urine doesn't it and that's sure enough that's what we're talking about urea as a suffix it means in the urine or about the urine and so that's a Suffolk we can add to our word route okay so we got our little list here let's put some of this stuff together with our word routes and see what we got we know that our throw is our combining form for joint and itis for inflammation but when we say those all together there are throw why it is that just sounds weird that doesn't sound right somehow so we're just going to throw in a little note here that if the suffix starts with a vowel which most of them do then you don't have to add the oh we don't say our throw itis if you listen to the commercial about arthritis medications they don't say arthritis they just say arthritis because the suffix has a vowel we don't need another vowel the words already smooth recovered it's good we just say arthritis so let's look at another word root with that combining vowel tonsil oh now we didn't go over this one already but you could probably tell what it means you can probably take a good guess and then we know what ectomy means we talked about ectomy so tonsils surgical removal but we don't say tonsillectomy that's just not necessary and it sounds weird so we've already got a vowel the word is smooth we're covered we can chuck that oh and get rid of it and just say tonsillectomy surgical removal of the tonsils let's look at this one here in our word roots we mentioned he met that it means blood and now we've got this suffix urea so let's put those together and see what we get he motto blood urea in the urine so urea starts with a u we can chuck that oh we don't need it and so it becomes this word called hematuria so you didn't even know you knew that word but you know that word because you know the parts hematuria and it means blood in the urine which is usually not good we don't normally find any measurable quantity of blood in the urine it's not meant to be there unless something is wrong and infection the kidney stone may be something even worse but blood in the urine is hematuria and all you got to do is break it down to the parts and you've got it now like we said so suffixes are kind of exciting you know these ones we learned itis ectomy urea they're pretty cool but some suffixes are just boring anytime you see us like Oh us like Venus Venus that owe us just means about pertaining to this is what we're talking about Venus means we're talking about veins that's it more I ca see any of these little any of these little fragments tacked on to the end of the word they're not very exciting but and they all just mean like yeah yeah we're just this is what we're talking about this but some suffixes are kind of exciting and interesting the suffix OMA OMA means a tumor or a mass think of a carcinoma or a hematoma not all tumors are cancerous but that suffix OMA fibroma glioma if you ever see OMA on the end of a word is talking about a tumor or a mass plea gia is another suffix plea Gia referring to paralysis or stroke someone's had a stroke and they're paralyzed on one side of their body Hemi means half plea gia means paralysis they're half paralyzed hemiplegia see all we're doing is building a longer word out of building blocks that's all we're doing another handy suffix amia means in the blood or about the blood amia so back terenia bacteria bacter emia in the blood bacteria in the blood which is also not good you didn't even know you knew these words once you learn the building blocks you do know these words so now we're great we're rocking we've got our word route we've got our suffix the only thing we're missing on some words that you'll see is a prefix not all words have a prefix but some do and it can make a huge difference in the meaning of the word so the prefix appear before the word root and it can change the meaning of the whole thing so let's look at some examples here the prefix hyper it means too much it's too much it's excessive hyper that's our prefix so if we look at some examples hyperventilate you ever seen someone hyperventilating they just having a panic attack or something that is hyperventilating breathing too fast too much hyper thyroidism hyper too much excessive thyroid ism this is an overactive thyroid an overactive thyroid and it produces a very distinct set of signs and symptoms they come along with that disorder so now let's look at the opposite of hyper hypo if hyper is too much hypo is not enough it's deficient there's not enough so let's look at some examples of that hypo ventilate hypo ventilate you're not breathing in and out enough you know doing enough maybe you're too sedated maybe you've combined some medicines you shouldn't have and your breathing is slowed down to a point that my beginning danger is hypo ventilate when you've probably already heard of as hypothermia hypo to low thermia that almost looks like the word thermostat doesn't it so hypothermia your body temperature is too low and if it gets below a certain level big big problems including death so another prefix speaking of prefix is pre pre and that just means before or proceeding like preoperative pre-op you might for that term pre-op that's where we take folks before surgery we take them to the pre-op area which we call holding a lots of things happen in the preoperative period do some lab work sometimes all kinds of things but that's the period before the actual operation pre operative and here's another one preterm labor pre term if you go into labor before their term of gestation is actually complete and they consider that line to be of 37 weeks if you go into labor before 37 weeks between you know between twenty and thirty seven anywhere in between twenty and thirty seven that is called preterm labor another prefix is just a letter a a and it means without or absent here's some examples asymptomatic so without we see the a for without we see the word symptom without symptoms so maybe someone has a virus and they don't actually have symptoms they're not actually showing symptoms of being sick but they are carrying the virus and transmitting transmitting it to others they're a carrier but they themselves might not have any symptoms they're asymptomatic a means without here's another one asystole without systole systole means the electrical contraction of the heart so if you are without any electrical contraction in your heart that's what you see on TV all the time when they're flatlining and the machines are always so loud on TV with a flatline that's called asystole so you see that prefix a it just means without or absent two other ones I just want to go over real quickly because you tend to see them a lot and healthcare is tacky and Brady it's not tacky it's tacky like that jacket is really tacky is that's how you say this tacky tacky and Brady so tacky means wrap it so faster the normal limits umber eighty means slow slower than normal limits and a term we often hear this with for the word route we often hear this with the word route car D meaning pertaining to the heart tachy cardia tachycardia and that means literally a heart rate that is faster than normal limits generally that's over 100 beats a minute tachycardia tachycardia and the opposite of that is bradycardia brady kardea brady slower than normal limits cardi pertaining to the heart bradycardia so that's a heart rate that's slower than normal limits generally somewhere below 60 so now let's look at some examples let's take a little pop quiz here and see how you do on some of these putting all of these train cars together so let's look at this word dermatitis what do you think of that okay so we shop this word up and we see one piece that's that we're familiar with dermat we know what that is and we see itís so we put them together we know that dermat is about skin itis is inflammation so dermatitis is inflammation of the skin maybe someone got a rash from using a soap they didn't know they had an allergy to maybe they got a little poison ivy who knows but dermatitis is inflammation of the skin so let's look at this one it might look a little intimidating but it's not really splenic to me splenic to me now let's chop it up we know what ectomy is we got that one right Splenda it bears a strong resemblance good guess and sure enough it means spleen so splenic to me we don't say splenectomy we say splenic to me and it means surgical removal of the spleen so here's another one that may look intimidating but it's really not hyper insulin emia hyperinsulinemia let's break it down we got hyper we know what that is because let's go to the end amia we've seen that before we know what emia is and somewhere in the middle is that word that this looks like insulin okay so we got those segments hyper means excessive amia means in the blood insulin what do you know it means insulin so hyperinsulinemia is when there is excessive insulin in the blood and this is sometimes a condition found in people who are on their way to becoming a type-2 diabetic here's another one I don't want you to be too confused I threw you a curveball here I did cardio thoracic cardio thoracic now look down below at our train we've got two blue cars two blue cars didn't know we could do that well remember we mentioned it so now we're going to take a look at it you can have two word routes we've got this one that's car D cardio we've got something in the middle about thorax and then I see on the end well that's one of those suffixes we know what that is so let's see if we can figure it out but I didn't tell you what for Accra thoris thorak Oh what that word root means but it means chest so cardio means heart of thorak door ask me nest it pertaining to so we put them all together and cardiothoracic means pertaining to the heart and chest some surgeons specialize in heart only some will do heart or anything in the chest lungs as well for example and that's all you had to do to break that word down so I hope that increases your confidence at medical terminology if you know what each individual building block means you can figure out the whole thing thanks for watching and I hope it was helpful to you