How to interpret he voting on this Q&A is a little unclear to me — the question with one proposed system is upvoted and the answer with an alternative proposal is downvoted, but I’m not sure if that means the community likes the system presented in the question or they just want some system. As such, I’m offering an answer that can be voted on next to Tim’s answer. I’m actually not against his system at all, and if the community prefers that please upvote it.

My suggestion is that we use the following, mostly technical tags. (I have pulled apart “otolaryngology” into its component parts and labeled them with common term because it seemed unnecessarily opaque; otherwise these are mostly the suggestions from the question.) Each one should have one or more synonym defined, for which I think Tim’s list would be a great place to start.

• neurology, ear, nose, throat, cardiology, pulmonology, gastroenterology, nephrology, urology, gynecology, obstetrics, pediatrics, musculoskeletal, podiatry, endocrinology, infectious-diseases, dermatology, ophthalmology, allergy, hematology, oncology, rheumatology, sleep, psychiatry, pharmacology, epidemiology, nutrition, toxicology

I think that most questions here should fall into one or more of these categories. Most questions would also carry a disease-specific, drug-specific, and/or parameter-specific (e.g. blood-pressure) tag. There is also a set of less systematic tags that has popped up including things like side-effects, heredity, etc. that I think are great supplements.

How to interpret he voting on this Q&A is a little unclear to me — the question with one proposed system is upvoted and the answer with an alternative proposal is downvoted, but I’m not sure if that means the community likes the system presented in the question or they just want some system. As such, I’m offering an answer that can be voted on next to Tim’s answer. I’m actually not against his system at all, and if the community prefers that please upvote it.

My suggestion is that we use the following, mostly technical tags. (I have pulled apart “otolaryngology” into its component parts and labeled them with common term because it seemed unnecessarily opaque; otherwise these are mostly the suggestions from the question.) Each one should have one or more synonym defined, for which I think Tim’s list would be a great place to start.

• neurology, ear, nose, throat, cardiology, pulmonology, gastroenterology, nephrology, urology, gynecology, obstetrics, pediatrics, musculoskeletal, podiatry, endocrinology, infectious-diseases, dermatology, ophthalmology, allergy, hematology, oncology, rheumatology, sleep, psychiatry, pharmacology, epidemiology, nutrition, toxicology

I think that most questions here should fall into one or more of these categories. Most questions would also carry a disease-specific, drug-specific, and/or parameter-specific (e.g. blood-pressure) tag. There is also a set of less systematic tags that has popped up including things like side-effects, heredity, etc. that I think are great supplements.