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Maintaining Your Sense of Humor as a Medical Transcriptionist

After working as a medical transcriptionist for 3 years, I can tell you that it is often a highly frustrating job. After all, the doctor’s patients are most often sick! This is not a job for someone who is excessively sensitive to verbal descriptions of medical problems.

You also have to deal with doctors who clearly would rather be doing anything other than dictating… and they often are. Eating, driving, using the bathroom, having conversations with other people, you just never know. It’s your job to make sense of it all.

You’re often best off laughing off the doctors’ behavior and mistakes. They will make mistakes, such as the doctor who dictates that a patient is leaving the hospital alive without his permission. You hear sometimes about doctors having a god complex, but sometimes it seems to go a little far!

Errors in vocabulary can also be humorous, but you’d better catch them. Perineal and peroneal, for example. They sound the same and mean entirely different things. You can laugh at yourself if you catch yourself trying to make this mistake, but only if you catch it.

Same for errors in grammar or punctuation. You may find it amusing how very different a sentence is when you briefly misplace a comma. Just don’t leave it misplaced. Sometimes you’ll get an entirely different meaning.

Doctors and patients both may have interesting names. These can bring you a brief smile at the beginning of a report, and the wonderful part is you don’t have to fix it when you’ve heard it right.

Then there are the times that a doctor will make body parts disappear when they really mean that the pain is gone. Or they’ll add on an extra toe or finger somehow. Unless the patient has an unusual deformity, you know that five per hand or foot is normal.

Body parts can also wander. You may have to put in a note for clarification if it is not clear which part was actually meant. This is a part of why a medical transcriptionist needs to know so much about anatomy.

A sense of humor helps in this line of work, but only if you know when to leave it funny versus correcting the error. The work is, after all, quite serious in nature and you can easily impact the medical care a patient is receiving. Don’t let the laughs over the mistakes you hear or make yourself impact patient care.

Stephanie Foster runs http://www.medicaltranscriptionbasics.com/ for people interested in becoming medical transcriptionists. Find out if you are ready to train as a medical transcriptionist at her site.

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