I heard a number of people on RTE radio recently (including Marion Finucane and a guest) pronounce the word “medicine” as if it had 2 syllables: med-sin.

For me, the word has always had 3 syllables: meh-de-sin.

Interestingly “Cambridge Dictionaries Online” allows you to hear the UK and US pronunciations and apparently the 2 syllable version is UK and the 3 syllable version is US.

Interestingly also, the two languages agree that the word “medicinal” has 4 syllables, i.e. both are based on the 3 syllable version of “medicine”. So there is no word pronounced med-sin-al. I’m sure a linguist would find lots of examples to show that my reasoning is invalid, but, to my way of thinking, this undermines the validity of the 2 syllable version.