Medical Transcription and Dancing.......

You may ask, "What, exactly, does MT have to do with dancing?"

It goes like this. Dr. Ditzy works in an ER near a club. As it turns out, pole dancing is a high-injury activity, and Dr. Ditzy occasionally has to treat the dancers for sprains incurred while arching, grinding, dangling perilously from the ankles and spinning around a pole in 5-inch heels. Most of these pole dancing injuries are minor, but still, mothers, don't let your daughters grow up to be pole dancers; they visit the ER as often as football players from the local high school. It's a treacherous profession. Please, send your daughters to law school instead.

Back to MT...Dr. Ditzy is dictating an ER report on a 21-year-old pole dancer who is in for knee pain. It seems she has (in a highly erotic manner, of course) managed to bang her right knee against the pole during her dance routine and subsequently has come into the ER for an x-ray. Once Dr. Ditzy speaks the words "pole dancer," he suddenly becomes tongue-tied and begins fumbling around for words. This is understandable, and a good MT immediately knows what to do...get a cup of tea and wait. He'll come to his senses in a minute. In the meantime, he continues dictating haltingly and breathlessly whispers a word that sounds like "apree." Deciphering the words of a doctor in such a condition is a skill needed by all MTs.

Since the patient is 21 and the doctor had previously dictated that she is sexually active, and you remember those days very well....Oh, the passion!...you suspect that "apree" might be some kind of contraception.

If your cat happens to be sleeping on your drug book, you might want to search online and see what you can find out about apree. That's where MPR, Monthly Prescribing Reference, comes into play.

MPR lets you search by sounds-like criteria and makes suggestions if you don't spell the word in question correctly, just like Google does. If you type "apree" in the search box, it says, "Did you mean to search for 'Apri' (you idiot)?" And there you have your word. And no, it doesn't accuse you of being an idiot, I put that in there myself. It's just that I felt like an idiot when Apri first came out and I hadn't heard of it yet. It's hard being an MT. We have feelings, you know.

MPR also lets you search by therapeutic category. You can choose OB/Gyn, click on Contraceptives, and a list of OCPs pops up. You can scroll down the list until you find the one that you're looking for.

If you are worried about Dr. Ditzy's condition and are looking for a hypertension drug for him to take after the pole dancer leaves, you can choose Cardiovascular System, click on Hypertension, and a list of hypertension drugs pops up for consideration.