All the Terrible Slang Your Doctor Is Using Behind Your Back

Maybe it comes from battling death itself as a job, but people who work in medicine can be some dark mf’ers, and you can see it in their slang. Not only have doctors and nurses perfected gallows humour, but they can use most of their “secret words” right in front of patients and their families and they’ll never even know.

Before you go on: Many of the unofficial medical terms below are un-woke, not-PC, callous, and insulting to all sorts of different kinds of people who ought not to be insulted, so turn back if it’s going to bother you.

There’s a debate to be had as to whether it’s acceptable to ever use these kinds of words, even if you are using them privately to cope with the gravity of your vocation, but it’s not happening here.

Like any slang, these definitions aren’t used by every medical professional in every hospital and doctors office — I’m sure all of your care providers are professional at all times and would never use any of these terms behind your back. But just in case:

• AALFD – If you’re being clinical, you might call it “drug-seeking behaviour,” but if you’re being slangy, it’s AALFD: Another Arsehole Looking For Drugs.
• ATS – If a patient is faking an illness, a doctor might say they are suffering from ATS, or “acute thespian syndrome.”
• Celestial Discharge: A dead patient is said to have been given “celestial discharge” from the hospital. See also: D/C to J.C. and ECU.
• Code Brown: Where “code blue” indicates a critical situation where a patient requires immediate emergency care, “code brown” means someone pooped and it needs to be cleaned up. See VLE.
• CTD: If you overhear your doctor saying you are “CTD,” it means you’re “circling the drain,” or “close to death.” Either way, it’s bad times.
• D/C to J.C.: This stands for “discharged to Jesus;” in other words, dead.
• Dyscopia: This faux-medical term refers to patients or their family having difficulty coping.
• ECU: If a patient is transferred to the Eternal Care Unit, they have died.
• FLK– This acronym stands for “Funny Looking Kid,” it was/is used by pediatricians and refers to children with nonspecific facial dysmorphia. It’s been around since at least this 1969 issue of JAMA where a doctor decries the term as lacking in compassion.
• FTD: This acronym has two opposite meaning. In some hospitals it means “fixin’ to die.” In others, it means “failure to die,” and is used to describe elderly patients who remain alive against all odds.
• FOS: This acronym for “full of shit” is apparently popular among pediatricians as a way to describe a constipated child. It’s extra useful because if a parent asks what it means, you can tell them it means “full of stool.”
• Frequent Flyer: According to freedictionary.com, this slang term refers to “A patient who is admitted repeatedly to the same hospital for the same non-resolving cluster of symptoms.”
• GOMER: This stands for “get out of my emergency room.” It was popularised in the 1978 novel House of God where it is used to describe “a patient who is frequently admitted with complicated but uninspiring and incurable conditions.”
• Hollywood Code: Pretend to work on patient who is clearly past saving, usually for the sake of their family.
• Incarceritis: This term describes an illness that occurs when jail is in the patient’s immediate future.
• Krumping (or “crumping”): This does not refer to a patient energetically dancing. In an unofficial medical context, krumping means a patient’s condition is rapidly deteriorating.
• Status dramaticus: A play on the medical term “status asthmaticus,” this term refers to a patient who is exaggerating their symptoms. It’s a more colourful way of saying “malingering.”
• Social injury of the rectum: This phrase is the opposite of most these terms in that it’s a polite way of describing the condition of people who present to the hospital with something stuck in their butt.
• VLE: A “valuable life experience,” refers to giving an unpleasant job to an underling, like after a code brown.
• Walkie-Talkie: This refers to elderly patients who are still mobile and verbal. “Walkie-talkie, still use the potty,” can be said as well.