In English, medical slang has entered popular culture via television hospital and forensic science dramas such as ER, House M.D., NCIS, Scrubs, and Grey's Anatomy, and through fiction, in books such as The House of God by Samuel Shem (Stephen Joseph Bergman), Bodies by Jed Mercurio, and A Case of Need by Jeffery Hudson (Michael Crichton) Examples of pejorative language include bagged and tagged for a corpse, a reference to the intake process at a mortuary; donorcycle for motorcycle; and PFO for pissed [drunk] and fell over.
[citation needed] Another reason for the decline is that facetious acronyms could be confused with genuine medical terms and the wrong treatment administered.
In one of his annual reports (related by the BBC), medical slang collector Adam Fox cited an example where a practitioner had entered “TTFO”, meaning “told to fuck off”, on a patient’s chart.
When questioned about the chart entry, the practitioner said that the initials stood for “to take fluids orally.”[1] Today, medical slang tends to be restricted to oral use and to informal notes or e-mails which do not form part of a patient’s formal records.
[1][2] There is an annual round-up of the usage of medical slang by British physician Dr. Adam Fox of St Mary's Hospital, London.