Stedman’s Medical Dictionary for the Health Professions and Nursing (2011) is relatively inexpensive and comes with a CD-ROM that will add about 60,000 medical terms to your word processor’s dictionary.
I just did it and tested it out. It took seconds to install. My test words were conus medullaris, and Stedman’s got it right.
There might be a word or two that Stedman’s will get wrong. For example, I ran it on some of my previous posts. It did not recognize toxidromes as a word in my post about Toxicology Handbook. If toxidrome is a word then so is toxidromes – or at least it is word-worthy!
Also, it would be a huge plus if the program could blaze through an entire website and pick up all the spelling errors automatically. As it stands right now, I would need to open up each post, paste it to Microsoft Word, run the spellchecker, then copy and paste it back to WordPress. That’s a bit of a hassle!
All in all, I recommend this package (book, CD-ROM and free one year subscription to Stedman’s Online) very highly to anyone who writes about medicine and cares about trying to get better at it.
Props to my residency program for the generous educational fund that was used to buy this book!
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