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Nothing by mouth is a medical instruction meaning to withhold food and fluids. It is also known as nil per os ( npo or NPO ), a Latin phrase that translates to English as "nothing through the mouth". Variants include nil by mouth ( NBM ), nihil / non / nulla per os, or complete bowel rest. [1] A liquid-only diet may also be referred to as bowel ...
The main discussion of these abbreviations in the context of drug prescriptions and other medical prescriptions is at List of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions. Some of these abbreviations are best not used, as marked and explained here.
This is a list of abbreviations used in medical prescriptions, including hospital orders (the patient-directed part of which is referred to as sig codes). This list does not include abbreviations for pharmaceuticals or drug name suffixes such as CD, CR, ER, XT (See Time release technology § List of abbreviations for those).
Pronunciation follows convention outside the medical field, in which acronyms are generally pronounced as if they were a word (JAMA, SIDS), initialisms are generally pronounced as individual letters (DNA, SSRI), and abbreviations generally use the expansion (soln. = "solution", sup. = "superior").
Per os (/ ˌ p ɜːr ˈ oʊ s /; P.O.) is an adverbial phrase meaning literally from Latin "through the mouth" or "by mouth". The expression is used in medicine to describe a treatment that is taken orally (but not used in the mouth such as, for example, caries prophylaxis). The abbreviation P.O. is often used on medical prescriptions. Scope
Lesser-common Latin abbreviations and usages abbreviation or word Latin translation usage and notes A.B. Artium Baccalaureus "Bachelor of Arts" An undergraduate bachelor's degree awarded for either a course or a program in the liberal arts or the sciences, or both. a.C.n. ante Christum natum "before Christ"
Historically, it was a physician's instruction to an apothecary listing the materials to be compounded into a treatment—the symbol ℞ (a capital letter R, crossed to indicate abbreviation) comes from the first word of a medieval prescription, Latin recipere (lit. ' take thou '), that gave the list of the materials to be compounded.
Second, medical roots generally go together according to language, i.e., Greek prefixes occur with Greek suffixes and Latin prefixes with Latin suffixes. Although international scientific vocabulary is not stringent about segregating combining forms of different languages, it is advisable when coining new words not to mix different lingual roots.