Learn medicine's vocabulary by saying it.
A tutor that takes you through diseases and symptoms by voice: it names one and you say what it is, it describes one and you name it, it asks what else it is called. It corrects you and keeps track of every term. You press one button and talk.
Minute packs from €12 for 100 minutes, no subscription. The term lists are free.
What a session sounds like
Tutor: Heart muscle dies because a coronary artery stays blocked. Which disease is that?
You: Myocardial infarction.
Tutor: And what do patients call it?
You: A heart attack.
Tutor: Next one. Pertussis, what is it?
What happens when you press Talk
1
The tutor picks a handful of terms
New ones it introduces. Ones you have met it asks about, in three directions: the name to the description, the description to the name, one name to the other.
2
Everything is scored in the background
Every term you describe or name is assessed and stored. What you missed comes back in the same session; what you know comes back less and less often.
3
When speech recognition mangles a word
It happens with ecchymosis or dyspnea. Then the tutor offers to let you put the word together from letter groups on screen. An offer, never a demand.
13905 diseases, 16233 signs and symptoms
The aim is all of them. Start with the core, the conditions and complaints every clinician is expected to know; go on to the textbook tier, some six thousand more; then everything else that has a name. Thousands of numbered subtypes are filed under their parent, so knowing the parent is enough to place them. You always see how much of each tier you have.
Names and other names follow the Mondo Disease Ontology, the Human Phenotype Ontology and MeSH. All in English.
- myocardial infarction · heart attack Death of a portion of heart muscle because a coronary artery is blocked, by atherosclerosis, a clot or a spasm; it classically presents with crushing chest pain that may spread to the left arm, neck or jaw.
- jaundice · yellow skin A yellow discoloration of the skin, mucous membranes and whites of the eyes caused by too much bilirubin in the blood; a sign of liver disease, bile duct obstruction or hemolysis.
- pertussis · whooping cough An acute, highly contagious respiratory infection caused by Bordetella pertussis, with fits of coughing that end in a loud whooping breath in; mainly in unimmunized infants and young children.
- syncope · fainting A brief loss of consciousness caused by a passing lack of oxygen to the brain, usually preceded by lightheadedness.
- gout · gouty arthropathy A disease in which excess uric acid forms sodium urate crystals that deposit in joints and other tissues, causing attacks of very painful joint inflammation, classically of the big toe.
What it is, and what it is not
It is a tutor for the vocabulary of clinical medicine: describing, naming, the other names, as often as it takes. With headphones on the way home or at the kitchen table.
It is not an exam simulator, not a source of medical advice, and it promises no pass rate. It does not yet teach differential diagnosis. You always see the time you talk: you buy minutes in packs, they are valid 30 to 90 days, and nothing keeps running in the background.