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The Practice of Naming New Diseases

Author: Craig Payne
by Craig Payne
Posted: Apr 24, 2021
named after

There has been a long tradition in medicine to name diseases after the physician that first described or published on that disease. Sometimes the physician named the disease after themselves which could be considered somewhat arrogant and other times it was given a physician’s name by their peers in recognition of their work, which would be considered an honour. Recently there has been a trend away from naming diseases after people.

There are many reasons for this trend. These days research is more likely to be carried out by teams and not individuals working alone, so it is difficult to credit a disease to only one individual. Sometimes in the past credit for a disease has gone to the wrong person and the condition may have been described by someone else earlier than the one that gets the credit.

A disease that is named after someone does not describe the actual pathology or the underlying biological mechanisms of the disease process which are often more help. For example, it is relatively easy to know what diseases like acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) or whooping cough are just based on the name. If these conditions were named after individuals, it would convey nothing of the underlying process. In a number of cases there may be more than one disease named after the same person or the same name. For example, there are 12 different conditions named after the neurosurgeon, Cushing.

Sometimes a condition that is named after an individual has something about their past that it is no longer appropriate to name the condition after them. For example, there was Reiter’s syndrome which was named after Dr Hans Reiter who was subsequently convicted of war crimes for his medical experiments performed at a Nazi concentration camp. The condition that was named as Reiter’s syndrome is now more commonly called Reactive arthritis. Likewise, Wegener’s Granulomatosis was named for Friedrich Wegener who was a Nazi physician. The name of the condition is now more generally known as granulomatosis with polyangiitis when Dr Wegener’s Nazi ties were discovered.

Another example is Sever’s disease which is a painful condition of the heel bone in children that is self-limiting. It was first described by Dr James Severs in 1912. It is not a disease, but the use of that language is potentially damaging to children. It is probably more appropriately called calcaneal apophysitis as the heel bone is technically called the calcaneus and the pathology is an inflammation of the apophysis (or growth plate).

The World Health Organization has now released guidelines on the naming of new diseases with an emphasis on a best practice to not name diseases after people or geographic regions in order to minimize the impacts on those people and the regions and their economies and to avoid stigmatization of people and regions. The best practices states that a disease name should consist of a generic descriptive term that are based on the symptoms that the disease causes and more specific descriptive terms when robust information is available on how the disease presents or behaves.

About the Author

Craig Payne is a University lecturer, runner, cynic, researcher, skeptic, forum admin, woo basher, clinician, rabble-rouser, blogger and a dad.

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Author: Craig Payne
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Craig Payne

Member since: Aug 16, 2020
Published articles: 252

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