Joseph Tein Feb 4, 2023:

Learning from each other Hi Laura. Congratulations on posting your first question! As I said, confidentiality is extremely important, and we can protect that and still post more complete context and background information to help our colleagues help us. Many terms and abbreviations/initialisms depend on the specific context. You're well on your way with all the feedback I've given you; I should also say that Liz who posted the answer below has reminded/corrected me many times on how to post a clearer question.

You would be able to give me the points if I went ahead and posted a separate answer of my own, but this isn't too important to me. Liz posted it and it will be available for future seekers here, and she also took the time to research and add the references for us.

Laura Bojneagu (asker) Feb 4, 2023:

Hi Joseph, unfortunately I had sent the report as soon as the penny dropped further to your suggestion as I was then 99% that it stands for conscious and oriented in the three dimension, so I no longer had any other details to share at that stage. However, I will keep this in mind for any future queries on proz. This so happens to be the very first kudoz question I ever posted so my apologies if I'd not followed the process quite to the letter. Also, since it was your suggestion that made the penny drop I would like to give you the kudoz for the answer except that since this was posted as a discussion entry rather than an answer I can't seem to find any way to actually grade this. If you would like to post this as an answer then I would be more than happy to award the kudoz points.

Joseph Tein Feb 3, 2023:

Confidentiality Hi again. I understand and share the concern about confidentiality ... and I think you can provide more context in your questions and still completely protect your clients' privacy.

I have posted over 1,400 questions here over the past 15 years. This has included complete sentences (when I forget to do this, our colleagues remind me) as well as information about the type of report we're dealing with and where in the report the term or abbreviation in question appears.

Other colleagues, when they post similar questions, do not include actual dates of service, or the name of the hospital, and of course never a patient's name or other identifying information. If I'm posting a sentence with other laboratory values or findings, I change the numbers slightly so that people don't see the real values. I sometimes change the patient's gender. I may leave out words or change a word or two of the text. This is to make it impossible to identify the actual case.

So, as I said, context is important if you want to get precise help. You can always say something is under Physical Examination (as you did) without giving away any personal information, and this helps narrow the possibilities

Laura Bojneagu (asker) Feb 3, 2023:

Thanks you Joseph, unfortunately I cannot post a snippet of the report as it is meant to be confidential, but I think you nailed it, COx3 might be conscious and oriented in the 3 dimensions. It's sits as an item in a list of vital signs under the heading "Physical Examination", thank you.

Joseph Tein Feb 3, 2023:

conciencia y orientación CO could also be this (there are 31 possible meanings of CO listed in Cosnautas); until we know what section of the report contains this abbreviation, we can't be sure what it means. Again: context is important.

Joseph Tein Feb 3, 2023:

background information Hi Laura. It would be most helpful to see this term in context. Can you post the complete sentence, with whatever values come before and after this, so we see it in its natural setting? That could help determine what this stands for.