Beginning a healthcare career is like visiting a foreign country. If you want to converse with the inhabitants, you need to speak their language. If you are interested in a career in healthcare, fl uency in its terminology is required. The goal of Mastering Healthcare Terminology is to help you learn the large number of terms that describe very specifi c healthcare conditions or procedures in the easiest, most effective manner possible.

We don ’ t often think about what makes up our language, perhaps because we are so familiar with it. Prefi xes, suffi xes, and word roots make up both the English language and healthcare language. A student of terminology can develop a sizable vocabulary by learning these decodable word parts and the rules necessary to join them together. Memorizing eponyms, abbreviations, symbols, and nondecodable terms completes a healthcare professional ’ s vocabulary.