Abbreviations are used very frequently in medicine. They boost efficiency as long as they are used intelligently. The advantages of brevity should be weighed against the possibilities of obfuscation (making the communication harder for others to understand) and ambiguity (having more than one possible interpretation).he prevalent way to represent plurals for medical acronyms and initialisms is simply to affix a lowercase s (no apostrophe). 1  Example: one OCP, two OCPs [oral contraceptive pills].