Get it together

Bill Simmons sometimes pokes fun at the journalism cliche of collocated words that rarely appear apart from each other -- you don't often see the word 'ruffled', and when you do, you  know the word 'feathers' is likely to be close by.

There's a similar phenomenon in medicine, though I stubbornly have refused to acknowledge it.

Consider the followed dialog that transpired during a recent overnight ED shift:

Resident: "I have a 32 year old woman with hyperemesis. I'd like to start antiemetics and IV fluids."

Me: "Is she pregnant?"

Resident, befuddled: "Um, yeah? I said she has hyperemesis."

Of course, the resident was using hyperemesis to denote hyperemesis gravidarum. But really, hyperemesis just means lots of vomiting. Just because it's rarely used outside the context of pregnancy, it doesn't mean it's not a useful term (indeed, cannabinoid hyperemesis is another entity we sometimes see in the ED.)

What other terms get truncated like this? Anorexia nervosa comes to mind -- saying "the patient has anorexia" literally just means there's a lack of appetite, not a lethal eating disorder.

I'm sure there are countless others, but I'm wondering: could any of these medical terminology shortcuts lead to particularly dangerous misunderstandings?

I don't think anyone would mistake a triad for a joint if a colleague said, "they've got Charcot..." On the other hand, abbreviating the confusing term "superficial venous thrombosis" could lead to a mixup in therapies...