Manual for Relatively Painless Medical Spanish: A Self-Teaching Course

Spanish-speaking patients are no rarity in United States hospitals and clinics, as many English-speaking health care providers have discovered. To help these providers better communicate with the patients they serve, Ana Malinow Rajkovic has prepared the Manual for (Relatively) Painless Medical Spanish, a lively and innovative self-teaching guide to the grammar, pronunciation, and medical vocabulary of Spanish.

Presented in a systematic and highly entertaining fashion, twelve lessons cover some of the most commonly encountered situations. These include the family clinic, the emergency room, appendicitis, the social chat, pregnancy, family planning, pelvic inflammatory disease and urinary tract infection, depression, children with asthma, patients with angina, explaining a venipuncture and a spinal tap, and patients with shortness of breath. Each lesson closes with a bilingual interview that includes vocabulary and grammar introduced in that lesson. A guide to the medical history and physical examination appears in English and Spanish in the appendix.

Excellent in the classroom or for independent learning, the Manual will enable health care providers better to understand and supply the needs of Spanish-speaking patients.

Ana Malinow Rajkovic is a pediatrician in Cleveland, Ohio. She has taught medical Spanish at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine and at San Francisco General Hospital.