From: "Dr. D. Kossove" <doctordee@telkomsa.net>
To: "David Murphy" <murfyda@pacbell.net>
Subject: abbreviations
Date: Saturday, December 06, 2003 10:17 PM

Date:    Sat, 6 Dec 2003 18:47:20 -0800
From:    Dave Murphy <murfyda@PACBELL.NET>
Subject: Resource for Medical and Pharmaceutical abbreviations

A question came up about the lists use of abbreviations, NED, VATS, RFA, etc.  I
remember hearing about a website to help with this.  I had it bookmarked.

It is MediLexicon at http://www.medilexicon.com/ .  The website says
"MediLexicon has the world's largest online database of pharmaceutical and
medical abbreviations - over 85,000 and growing. Our database is updated daily
to include new acronyms and abbreviations and their meanings. Our resource is
free to use, allowing people to instantly look up meanings for acronyms and
abbreviations from the fields of medicine, pharmacy, biotechnology,
agrochemicals, healthcare and more."

This website has improved since I last visited it, now with search fields for
Pharmaceutical Companies, Medical Terms Dictionary, Drug Search, and more.

So I tried NED, VATS, and RFA.  In the "Medical Abbreviation" search box I
searched for NED (No Evidence of Disease).  A separate window opened listing the
results, including other possible abbreviations that I maybe meant to type.  To
the right of each result is a link to medical articles.  For NED (No Evidence of
Disease) it takes you to PubMed.

I searched for VATS (Video-Assisted Thoracoscopic Surgery) then clicked on the
medical articles link, and it took me to PubMed, listing 1100 articles.  I
searched for RFA (Radiofrequency Ablation) then clicked on the medical articles
link, and it took me to PubMed, listing 4050 articles.

Each "medical articles" window is a separate window, so you can have multiple
results windows open (for those of you that like several windows open).

This is much better than before.  I'll still use Refdesk at
http://www.refdesk.com , but for medical abbreviations, this looked good.

I hope this is helpful to you too.

Dave Murphy - LA, Ca
Husband to Piera  11/5/57-10/28/99
8/98 dx LMS
11/98 dx chg'd to MFH
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