When
• Gun shot wound = 3 syllables, and
• GSW = 5 syllables
We abbreviate to shorten, not lengthen.
Easier to write. We spend 5 minutes talking about you at handoff (and I need to write down everything AS the other person is talking) then I have to write a mini essay about each person. Abbreviations are highly specific to specialty, but much easier. An example from my specialty might be:
SI / attempt r/o. BIBA GSW LA (iso suspect DV but pt denies), + ligature marks neck. WC placed, CT (-).
Which is to say
The ambulance brought them to the ED for a gunshot wound to the left arm. We’re pretty sure the spouse tried to shoot them and it looks like they tried to strangle them too, but they won’t admit it / are covering for them. The wound consult is in and they did a CT of their neck already, no severe injury noted. We’re ruling out that this was a suicide attempt and trying to get them to at least talk about what happened / get them into a DV shelter or somewhere else safe.
…which is like 4-5 times as long.
I dont know why GWS is used , but there are a bunch of the medical abbreviations that are not intuitive to me.
- PRN = As Needed
- ASA = aspirin
- BRP = Bathroom Priviledges (this one is intuitive)
- PT = Bloodtest
- bid = Twice a Day
- BS can = Breath Sounds or Bowl Sounds
- C with a “-“ on top of it means “with”
- M = so many things.
- PRN is an abbreviation of a Latin phrase “pro re nata”.
- ASA is acetylsalicylic acid which is the chemical name for aspirin
- PT is a specific type of blood test that measures how long it takes for blood to clot called “prothrombin time”
- BID comes from another Latin phrase “bis in die”. TID is 3 times and QID is 4 times a day
- BS can also mean blood sugar
- c̅ is basically equivelant to w/ meaning with but it comes from the Latin “cum”
I thought pt meant patient?
Or physical therapy. I’ve never seen either of the major clotting labs abbreviated “PT.” You typically say PTT for prothrombin time or INR for the PT-INR.
Is this a stupid ai question?
My best guess is…. no, but you probably could have made it sound more human had you not bothered to ask to begin with.
Hospitals and ambulances do a lot of handwritten reports. In a conversation, the nurse/doctor/paramedic will say ‘gunshot wound’ but write it GSW.
Worked in public health and never heard anyone say ‘GSW.’
Could be that it’s a TV only thing. Been binging a lot of medical dramas lately.
New season of The Pitt coming out this week I think
Tomorrow. I’m stoked.
Wait until you learn about abbreviating the World Wide Web
Is that a hospital term I’m unaware of?
www as in www.website.tld means “world wide web”. Double-U double-U double-U uses 9 syllables when world wide web uses 3
G S Dub.
It’s also shorter to write.
Depends on the language you use. In the Netherlands W is pronounced as “wae” instead of “double you”.
How are you pronouncing those words? I get 6 and 3 syllables respectively.
Gun ¹ Shot ¹ Wound ¹ = 3
G ¹ S ¹ W ³ = 5
The letter “w” is three syllables.
Double ² and U ¹
It’s quicker to write/type the abbreviation, so syllables don’t matter. Most common example of more syllables in the abbreviation than the words themselves is “WWW” (9 syllables) for “World Wide Web” (3 syllables). Quicker to type but longer to speak.
…i never understood why the convention didn’t become web.domain.tld for exactly that reason…
While we’re at it, I never understood why the convention for domain name wasn’t left to right tld, domain, subdomain. Most significant on left is how we do almost everything else, including numbers and ISO 8601 dates.
Because we must pay homage to mister World Wide himself, Pitbull, as we browse the internet.
I saw Stephen Fry suggest once that it be pronounced “Wuh Wuh Wuh” which I kind of like :-)
Dub dub dub.
Gee ess dub dub sounds like a burger joint menu item.
Yep. I think this his the answer. Hadn’t thought of it being abbreviated as written, then spoken as the written shorthand.
Just pulling this out of my ass, but perhaps it’s an artifact from handwritten medical charts. GSW is shorter to write.
it’s faster typed out as well. When I worked call centres, we’d shorthand all of our notes because we had 15-30 seconds to wrap up the final notes after the call ended, not to mention no agent wants to read a novel to get up to speed.
Ooh! That’s probably it! I hadn’t thought of it that way.
Abbreviations aren’t just used to make a word quicker to say or write, but also to obfuscate.
You can yell GSW across a crowded room and not cause a panic like yelling “GUN SHOT wound” might.
I’d think that in an emergency room, it wouldn’t be that out of place to cause panic.
Then you’d think wrong.
So, what you’re saying is that the word “gun shot wound” would cause a panic…… in an ER.
so you just gonna ignore that dumb thing you previously said and pivot to something else
So you just gonna say I’m doing something I’m not doing just to have a reason to make some dumb edgy comment?
There are humans in an ER and humans are fucking stupid, so yes it could. The US is a silly place so people just instantly react to the word “gun” with thoughts of mass shootings.
Yeah, I wonder why we do that… Guess we’ll never know
