February 2nd, 2010 | 
Author: There’s a latin (or Greek) name for everything in medicine. Have you heard the Amateur Transplants song about latin names, Dorsal Horn Concerto?
You must say things like defacate, micturate, copulate. You can’t say things, like……
If you’ve not heard the song, you can go to their online shop, buy the first album, and the proceeds go to Macmillan Cancer.
I digress.
What name do you give to ‘stuff the patient coughs up? If it’s blood it’s haemoptysis, if it’s anything else it’s…. Sputum? Gob? Spit? Loogie? What if it’s something a bit solid.
This week’s BMJ has a short article about a man who coughed up a big blob of tissue, which turned out to be a bit of tumour. They suggest Histoptysis as a Greek name for coughing up bits of tissue. Or Oncoptysis for coughing up bits of tumour specifically.
Will it catch on?
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How about histoptysis as the generic term, and oncoptysis for actual tumours coughed up. So, if, somehow, say, a transbronchial biopsy gets left, then coughed up later, it would by histoptysis?
Thank you for quoting from our Filler in the BMJ. Joel got it right: histoptysis is the generic term, but the majority of reported cases involved tumour, hence oncoptysis. Technically speaking, any kind of tissue, whether spontaneously expectorated or left over from some procedure, could be labelled as histoptysis. Come to think of that, we could call them primary and secondary histoptysis, respectively.