Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Mentally dulled. Head trauma may obtund a person.

Blockage of a passageway. See, for example: Airway obstruction; Intestinal obstruction.

The art and science of managing pregnancy, labor, and the puerperium (the time after delivery).

A physician who specializes in obstetrics.

A psychiatric disorder characterized by obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions, such as cleaning, checking, counting, or hoarding. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), one of the anxiety disorders, is a potentially disabling condition that can persist throughout a person’s life. The individual who suffers from OCD becomes trapped in a pattern of repetitive thoughts and behaviors that are senseless and…

Failure by the observer in a study or test to measure accurately, resulting in error. Inter-observer variation is the amount of variation between the results obtained by two or more observers examining the same material. Intra-observer variation is the amount of variation one observer experiences when observing the same material more than once.

1.Organic brain syndrome.2. Obstetricians, in the plural.

In a microscope, the objective (also called the objective lens) is the lens nearest to the object being examined whereas the lens closest to the eye is termed the ocular (the eyepiece). The light microscope today is usually binocular (with one ocular for each eye) and has a turret bearing a selection of objective lens.

Overweight caused by consuming more food than the person’s activity level warrants, leading to increased fat storage.

The state of being well above one’s normal weight. A person has traditionally been considered to be obese if they are more than 20 percent over their ideal weight. That ideal weight must take into account the person’s height, age, sex, and build. Obesity has been more precisely defined by the National Institutes of Health (the NIH) as a BMI…