In recent months I seem to have been asked to provide quite a lot of voiceovers for medical or pharmaceutical projects.  Scripts for these kinds of jobs always seem to have plenty of polysyllabic words to give your tongue and facial muscles a good workout.

For example a recent script contained a sentence that included  words referring to: “the pathophysiology of both drug-induced and congential coagulopathies”.

Another fairly typical sentence has the words:”This assumption is supported by the patient’s hypercholestrolaemia and prescription for thrombotic prophylaxis, which are associated with atherosclerosis”.

I used to be a bit daunted by these kinds of scripts but after recording quite a few I’ve learned that the key thing is not to panic, to double check the pronunciations with the client (I like to record these phone calls so that I’ve actually got an audio reference to listen to when I’m recording on my own) and to allow a bit more time for recording and editing. I’ve also discovered that I’m starting to actually understand what I’m talking about – which helps me to read the script in a way that makes sense to the listener (I hope).

I’ve found the recent bio-medical series I recorded for Smile-On pleasingly educational. I now know more than I ever imagined was possible about the anatomy and function of the digestive tract.

Likewise I feel fully informed on the cardio-vascular and circulatory system and now understand how those blood pressure figures work and what they mean (120 over 80 is good!).

In fact it was while I was recording the sections on blood pressure that I encountered a word I initially found very tricky to correctly pronounce. The word is “sphygmomanometer”.  Its the name for the inflatable cuff they put round your arm when they test blood pressure.  The tricky collection of  “ma”, “mo” and “no” sounds in the middle of the word made it pretty tough to master. It’s a word to take a bit of a run at and expect to record a few takes before it’s nailed. It felt good once I managed a whole sentence with it in!

Once I’d managed “sphygmomanometer” a few times, a sentence like this was was a doddle: “Hormonal hypertension[is] secondary to conditions like Cushing’s syndrome, Pheochromocytoma, a catecholamine-secreting tumour, Primary Hyperaldosteronism and Androgential Syndrome”.

It’s a good job I mastered the tongue twisting polysyllabic phraseology as the Smile-On Healthcare learning project was based around 5 scripts and a total of 19,000 words.

The Biomedical Foundations elearning project for dental practitioners is produced my Healthcare Learning