Abdomen, stomach, tummy

[sarawilcox]

Jira SS-355. Wording agreed at January Style Council. Published 4 March 2019.

[sarawilcox]

We do sometimes receive feedback like the following:

• re our Gallbladder cancer page: "On your website you repeatedly use the non-specific term "tummy". Do you mean stomach? In which case, for how long has the stomach contained lymph nodes? Or do you mean abdomen??? Please stop using nonsense words which make your articles difficult to understand. Your website is not aimed at 3 year olds, so please use the correct terms. "Tummy" is not an organ of the human body, is not specific and is not remotely helpful to anyone over the age of three."
• " have read various articles on this website, mostly out of curiosity. Most seem to be good, however there is one thing I am so tired of seeing and that is the dumbing down of the word 'abdomen' to TUMMY!!! Why do you do this?? Are British people who are reading about stomach ulcers, for example, so stupid that they repeatedly need to be told that the abdomen is their TUMMY?? That's a word most people stop using after age 10! I find that seriously insulting. Your articles lose credibility and lack any degree of authority the second I see that word! Please stop using it in articles directed at adults. I have been a nurse for 40 years and I have yet to encounter an adult patient with a TUMMY problem!! (My next complaint is people who use the term 'back passage'!!)"

We will continue to monitor this.

[GeorgeCritchley]

Recently reviewed a few resources referring to 'loin' pain. Should this be 'lower tummy' or do we need different language for 'loin' region?

[sarawilcox]

Hi @GeorgeCritchley, I asked your question on the NHS.UK Slack channel. There was some uncertainty about what "loins" are.

Here's what a colleague says: "I'd always thought "loin" in a medical sense referred more to lower back or sides (similar to "flank" when talking about pain), rather than the tummy specifically. It's often used in medical content to refer to kidney pain I can see on our UTI topic we talk about "pain in the lower tummy or in the back, just under the ribs" - I think this is a reference to loin/flank pain."

Here's a screenshot from 111 online. A 111 colleague says: "That's our wording for flank. We've not encountered loin before".

[sarawilcox]

Feedback to the service manual team about the use of the word "tummy"

It was unclear in meaning & distracting to read in official NHS information.

As indicated in the style guide, it refers to an area larger than the stomach. However, I think it is still more helpful to indicate "the area around the stomach" than use "tummy" for the general abdominal area. Mainly because patients are not expecting the word to carry that meaning.

It made me wonder what is meant by a usually childish word. It is misleading because general usage of that word refers to the stomach, but that is not the case in the article (on aortic aneurysm). I found it quite confusing.

[sarawilcox]

Some user feedback about the word "tummy".

"[Tummy] is, if anything, an abbreviation of stomach, and doesn’t really refer to the lower portion of the torso (more the middle area, directly under the ribs). Belly would be more tolerable ..."

[laura-hajba]

User testing on the use of abdomen vs tummy for the secondary care content type

For transformed appendicitis content on NHS.UK we decided to write "abdomen (tummy)" to explain where someone might experience symptoms of appendicitis.

The content was put in front of 7 participants across 3 rounds of testing and everyone understood what we were describing.

Key findings included:

• "abdomen (tummy)" was easily understood
• a participant freely used the term "abdomen" in conversation in the user testing session
• a participant suggested it was good to have both words - participant quote: "not everyone knows abdomen or appendix but people know tummy and bowel so good to have those terms"