The Trouble with IBS or Irritable Bowel Syndrome
The social impact of disease names is variable, and sometimes immense. If you have one “pariah” or outcast disease, like athlete’s foot, suggests the following article excerpt, you just don’t rate.
What if illnesses, ailments and diseases were brands? You’d have your embarrassing, awkward ones like irritable bowel syndrome and athlete’s foot. Your once well-known, but obscure ones that you find only in history books or Delmas, like diptheria and typhoid and polio. The diseases that everyone’s heard of but nobody knows much about, like multiple sclerosis and cystic fibrosis (hey, that rhymes). There are the ones that fill us with dread, like Alzheimer’s. The cancers are in a category of their own. And there are the truly terrifying, faintly exotic ones like Ebola or mad cow disease, diseases you never want to catch but which have a certain dark glamour nonetheless.
See more of Sarah Britten’s musings, on the light side of disease names, at http://blogs.thetimes.co.za/britten/2007/10/24/if-diseases-were-brands-part-i/
If IBS had a different name, like Arugula — which always did sound like a disease name to me — we would still have to answer questions of “what does it mean?” Still, we might get away with using words like “tummy” in the definition, rather than “bowel.” I’m not a fan of baby words like tummy, most of the time, but “Irritable Bowel Syndrome?” Come ON! Can’t we say “I have been diagnosed with “Chronic Pain in the Tummy” (CPIT) or “Continual Runs, usually Diarrhea” (CRUD).
What difference would a change of name make in your life? Let us know with a comment.
