Diary of a Second-Year Vet Student: Dx the Dz

No vax. Tx with abx only reduces Cx.

Somewhat cryptic but you can probably figure it out: no vaccine available. Treatment with antibiotics only reduces clinical signs. 

You already know that Rx means prescription (derived from the Latin, of course). We "health care professionals" use lots of abbreviations. Ddx is differential diagnoses, a ranked list of the things that could be causing the animal's observed symptoms. Related to that is dx which is used to mean diagnostic or diagnosis. Sx is surgery. I think that X is used because it is not otherwise a super common letter in the common languages of health care and medical science (which are mainly Latin, Greek, English, and German; French and Spanish are distant players). Disease is an exception to the X abbreviation family. We simply write dz. Diarrhea and vomiting are common enough that they too are abbreviated: D and V (some people draw an arrow instead of a line but computers have been gradually shifting that).

Those are all examples of abbreviations of common usage. They are not appropriate for formal papers or presentations but many vets and doctors will use them in writing up patient notes, for example, or communicating with techs or other doctors. There are plenty of other abbreviations that we use which are actual acronyms: IV for intravenous and Ab for antibody, for example. 

The most bewildering abbreviations are those used for diseases: FMD, CPV, BRSV (foot and mouth disease, canine parvovirus, bovine respiratory syncytial virus). They get out of hand very quickly. I try to avoid them because I think they lead to an uncomfortable level of ambiguity. We already use so many abbreviations and jargon. CAE is a bad disease, but when I spell it out as caprine arthritis (and) encephalitis, I have more things to associate with it: goats joints brain. Not a nice disease at all.

Like med students, vet students must learn about various ways that each type of tissue will respond to injury or disease. But on top of all this, vet students have to constantly overlay species variations. Some canine viruses can infect other species--the resulting disease may be like the one in dogs but it may located in entirely different tissues and thus have a completely different set of clinical signs, progression, diagnostic tests, and treatment.

In gross anatomy, there were lots of mnemonics we could use, such as the one created by one of my classmates to remember the names of the 12 cranial nerves: O! O! O! To Touch And Feel Very Good Velvet After Hours. Using dz and abx are only a convenience. Most of the rest has to be learned with old-fashioned, blunt force repetition. There are no true shortcuts at this point.