11 words only doctors understand

Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment and Disney–ABC Domestic Television

If you've ever spent time in a hospital or doctor's office, you know that people in medicine seem to have their own language. 

But while doctors may throw around a lot of jargon, there's often a simple translation of what they're trying to say.

Emergency room physician Brian Goldman documented several examples of the obscure terms doctors use in his book "The Secret Language of Doctors: Cracking the Code of Hospital Slang."

Read on to find out what your doctor is really saying:

Cowboy

People who work in hospitals have playful (and sometimes not-so-playful) nicknames for each other. A cowboy is what some doctors call surgeons to suggest they operate first and think later.

Flea

Flea is the disparaging nickname some doctors give to internists — people who specialize in internal medicine, and are seen by some as the lowest on the medical totem pole.

FOOBA

Apparently some doctors don't take kindly to orthopedic surgeons, either. Goldman says doctors describe some patients as FOOBA — "found on orthopedics, barely alive," that is — to suggest that an orthopedic surgeon fixed their bones, but missed critical signs of disease elsewhere in the patient's body.

The word is a play on FUBAR, the colorful military expression meaning "f---ed up beyond all recognition," Goldman wrote.

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