The Structure of Medical Terminology
It may seem like an impossible task to commit the spelling and meaning of 100,000 different medical terms to memory - and in fact, for most of us it is. Fortunately, it is not necessary. The fact is that most seemingly complex medical terms are simply combinations of much smaller subsets of word parts. This is a critically important concept to understand with medical terminology.
It is not unreasonable to expect to memorize several hundred medical prefixes, medical suffixes and medical root words in a relatively short period of time. Then, once these word parts are learned, they can be combined to form literally thousands of complex medical terms.
