# Medical vocabulary About 48,000 drug names, clinical terms and diagnoses, so the words a general model mangles come out spelled correctly. Dictate "metoprolol succinate" into a general dictation tool and you get something like "metro pull all". The word is not in the model's world, so it reaches for the nearest thing that is. That is the problem the medical vocabulary exists to fix. Turn it on in Settings → **Writing style → Transcription mode → Medical**. ## What is in it About 48,000 terms, built mostly from published, named sources: | Source | What it covers | | --- | --- | | FDA drug registry | Drug names, including brand names that follow no English spelling rule. | | National Library of Medicine | Clinical terminology. | | CDC ICD-10 | Diagnosis names. | A community-maintained medical word list fills the gaps those three leave. Between them they are the vocabulary of the chart, the referral letter and the discharge summary. ## What changes in practice Drug names and diagnoses come out spelled the way the profession spells them, on the first dictation, with no training period. The errors it catches are mostly not misspellings — they are real English words that sound like the term you said. "Loo poos" for lupus. "War far in" for warfarin. A general model has no reason to prefer the clinical term, and every reason to prefer the common words. The vocabulary applies whichever [cleanup style](/docs/cleanup-styles/overview/) you are using, but what it can do differs. On **Original** it corrects mangled spellings of specialist words directly. On every other style the terms go to the cleanup model, which is what allows a plausible-sounding English phrase to be recognised as the clinical term instead. If the near-miss errors above are your problem, **Fix typos** is the lightest style that can solve them. See [how that works](/docs/editions/overview/). ## Pair it with saved words No list of 48,000 terms knows the name of the registrar you refer to twice a day, or the abbreviations your clinic uses that nobody else does. Teach those to Blabb once, in Settings → **Writing style → Saved words**, and they stick from then on: [Teach Blabb your words](/docs/cleanup-styles/saved-words/). The two work together. The vocabulary handles the published terminology; saved words handle everything local to you. ## Doses and numbers Dosages, units and lateralities are where a rewrite is most expensive to get wrong, and they are also the part of a dictation you are least likely to re-read carefully. The protection that actually exists is the style you choose. **Original** changes nothing at all, and **Fix typos** corrects spelling and grammar without touching your wording — neither will quietly turn 5 mg into 50 mg, because neither is rewriting your sentence. Spoken numbers are still written out properly, and a value or unit is never swapped ([Numbers, symbols and addresses](/docs/cleanup-styles/numbers-and-symbols/)). Save the heavier styles for correspondence, and check anything that carries a number in [History](/docs/get-started/history/) while you are learning what your chosen style does. > [!IMPORTANT] > Blabb is a dictation aid, not a medical device. Review the output before it goes into the record — > the same as you would with anything you dictated to a person. ## On privacy, precisely Speech recognition and cleanup both run on your PC, and the term list is a database installed with the app rather than a cloud service. Nothing you dictate is uploaded. What that does and does not cover is set out in [What stays on your device](/docs/privacy/what-stays-on-device/). What we do not say is that Blabb is HIPAA compliant. It is not described that way, there is no business associate agreement, and you should not treat it as one when you assess it. On-device processing is a strong technical fact; it is not a compliance certification, and conflating the two would not be doing you a favour. ## See also - [Medical edition](/medical-dictation-edition) — what it costs and what is in it. - [Dictation for doctors](/dictation-for-doctors) — the fuller picture for clinical use. - [Medical and legal vocabulary](/docs/editions/overview/) — how the matching works. - [What stays on your device](/docs/privacy/what-stays-on-device/) — the exact boundary.