When is an acronym sufficiently sanctioned by long usage to be accepted?

摘要

The use of acronyms has of course been in use in medical literature for years - most medical entities are polysyllabic. Recently, there has been a great proliferation of acronym usage, whereby many journal articles become a series of acronyms sometimes interconnected by everyday basic English words but more often by pretentious polysyllabic ones. As there are so many subdisciplines in medicine now, each with its own collection of technical entities, it is becoming increasingly difficult for those practising in other disciplines, who are not of the cognoscenti, to comprehend the messages being delivered. This is compounded by authors inventing their own acronyms de novo; an acronym for a phrase such as 'intention to treat' (ITT) is mentioned once in the text when introduced, and for the reader is thereafter buried in the whole text, and often very difficult to find again. NSBP is meant to be interpreted as 'non-specific abdominal pain'. MUGA stands for 'multi-gated acquisition scan