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Journal of Chinese Integrative Medicine ›› 2013, Vol. 11 ›› Issue (3): 229-232.doi: 10.3736/jintegrmed2013026

• Methodology • Previous Articles    

The language of integrative medicine

Brian Stephen Budgell()   

  1. Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College, Toronto, Ontario Canada M2H 3J1
  • Received:2012-12-25 Accepted:2013-03-18 Online:2013-05-10 Published:2013-05-15

Biomedical language, also known as biomedical English, is sufficiently different from general English to warrant treatment as a distinct language. Biomedical language has its own conventions of grammar, phraseology and discourse, as well as a lexicon which is complex and esoteric. Furthermore, each sub-discipline, such as integrative medicine, has a unique vocabulary which must be mastered in order to achieve fluency. In this article, the vocabulary specific to acupuncture is identified, and strategies are introduced to master the use of that vocabulary.

Key words: Integrative medicine, Acupuncture, Linguistics, Information retrieval

Figure 1

The CQPWeb login page provides access to a number of corpora, including the corpus of acupuncture (users may login with the username “betaguest1” and the password “bmhling”)"

Figure 2

The “standard query” interface for the acupuncture corpusUsers may enter a search term in the query box and then click on “start query” to search for sentences containing the search term. The menu on the left hand side of the window also provides access to more advanced search functions."

Figure 3

The results of a standard search using the search term “needling”By using the mouse to hover over the search term within a sentence, a grammatical analysis of the sentence is revealed."

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