There's been a strong custom in medicine and surgery to call diseases following the medical professional who initially referred to or publicized on that condition. In some cases the doctor called the ailment after themselves that may be considered relatively conceited and other times it was provided with a physician’s name by their peers in acknowledgement of their work, that may be considered an honour. Most recently there has been a trend away from identifying diseases after doctors.
There are many reasons for this tendency. These days research is almost certainly going to be carried out by groups rather than individuals working alone, so it is hard to credit a disease to only one individual. From time to time in the past recognition for a disorder has gone to the wrong individual and the illness may have been explained by somebody else sooner than the one that has got the recognition.
A disease that's named after somebody won't refer to the particular pathology or even the underpinning biological mechanisms of the disease process which are often more helpful. As an example, it really is not too difficult to understand what disorders such as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (or AIDS) or perhaps whooping cough are just based on the actual name. If these kinds of illnesses had been called after doctors, it would express nothing at all of the underlying process. In several instances there could be more than one diseases named after the same person or the same name. For instance, you can find twelve different disorders named after the neurologist, Dr Cushing.
From time to time a illness which is named after a physician has something concerning their history that it's no longer acceptable to call the problem after them. One example is, there was Reiter’s syndrome which had been called after Dr Reiter who was subsequently convicted of war crimes for his medical experiments conducted in a Nazi concentration camp. The problem that has been known as Reiter’s syndrome is currently more generally known as Reactive arthritis. Likewise, Wegener’s Granulomatosis was named for Friedrich Wegener who was a Nazi physician. The term of the condition is currently more generally known as granulomatosis with polyangiitis as soon as his Nazi links were made public.
An additional illustration is Severs disease which is a painful condition in the heel bone in kids that is self-limiting. It was first described by J Severs back in 1912. It's not a disease, but the utilization of this terminology is possibly harmful to youngsters. It is probably more correctly termed calcaneal apophysitis since the heel bone is technically called the calcaneus and the pathology is an inflammatory reaction of the apophysis (or growth zone).
The World Health Organization has now released guidelines on the calling of new illnesses having an emphasis on a best practice to not name illnesses after people or geographical areas to be able to decrease the effects on those individuals along with the regions as well as their economies and to avoid stigmatization of individuals and areas. The very best practices suggests that a condition term should really contain a generic descriptive phrase that are based on the signs and symptoms that the disorder results in plus more specific descriptive words after robust information is found on how the disease presents or behaves.