Question

Why is proper spelling of medical terminology in health related professions important? Include in your response at least one example of how a spelling error might affect a patient s medical history.

Answer 1

Correct spelling of medical terminology is important for many reasons, if you were to misspell you could end up prescribing someone the wrong type of medication or say that something is wrong when its not. for your example you can use two medication abbreviations (since everything is basically abbreviated in the medical field) that are similar. the side effects from one could hurt someone.

Answer 2

There are very few examples of when such a mis-spelling would actually be life-threatening, but I could think of one example to do with dosing.

Prednisone and prednisolone are essentially the same drug – the liver converts prednisone to prednisolone, so if you give the latter, you're essentially just cutting out the middle man.  But dosage is very different.  For prednisone, you dose 2mg per kilogram of body weight per day.  So an 80kg man would get 160mg per day.  For prednisolone, that's over twice the maximum dose per day!

Can't really think of any other examples like that, but maybe that's helpful.