Medical Terminology: Active Learning Through Case Studies

Book excerpt: Medical terminology can be a daunting course for students with a seemingly endless list of words to memorize. Medical Terminology: Active Learning Through Case Studies provides a unique approach and considers medical words in terms of common combining forms, prefixes, and suffixes to determine meaning in context. Students feel empowered when they realize they have the knowledge to dissect a long, complicated medical term into simpler parts to determine its meaning. The text is organized by body system with related terms describing anatomical features, pathologies, and procedures grouped together in story form for easy recall. While engaging students with real-world stories and medical records to help learn medical terms is not unique, having a book with such a large collection of these cases is novel. The book is designed to provide instructors with a framework for students to apply their medical terminology knowledge as part of the learning process. The case studies have been desig