Disease Classification Quotes

Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic "causes" of these "conditions"?

They do certainly give very strange, and newfangled, names to diseases.

Breast cancer isn't one disease - it's probably four or five different types, and without knowing what type a person has, you can't optimize treatment for them.

They certainly give very strange names to diseases.

I think eventually they're going to find out that MS is like 10 different things. I have a neurological disease something like MS, and it's MS, so let's take medicine for it.

The words ending in Ique do mocke the Physician (as Hectique, Paralitique, Apoplectique, Lethargique).

I am not a physician, but I am deeply interested in diagnostic categories and have read extensively in the history of the subject.

We separate problems with the brain into neurological and psychiatric, and it's because it's stigmatised still. Mental illness is still stigmatised. Imagine if we treated people with cancer like that. Just because your personality changes and your behaviour changes, all of a sudden you are put in a different category.

Carl von Rokitansky is one of the founders of scientific medicine and systematized it, looking at what the clinical symptoms mean. The medicine we practice today, which is infinitely more sophisticated, is Rokitansky's medicine.

The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.

“Healthy" and “diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.

One might say, for example, that a patient has a kind of St Vitus's dance; a kind of dropsy; a kind of nerve fever; a kind of ague. One would never say, however (to end once and for all the confusion of these names) He has St. Vitus's dance, He has nerve fever, He has dropsy, He has ague, since there simply are not any fixed, unchanging diseases to be known by such names.

Correct is to recognize what diseases are and whence they come; which are long and which are short; which are mortal and which are not; which are in the process of changing into others; which are increasing and which are diminishing; which are major and which are minor; to treat the diseases that can be treated, but to recognize the ones that cannot be, and to know why they cannot be; by treating patients with the former, to give them the benefit of treatment as far as it is possible.

Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients than by assigned names.

There are other countries that if you had a preexisting condition, and let's say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem, some countries are recording as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death.

We are going to find, I think, several different kinds of Crohn's disease.

Nosology (from the Greek 'nosos,' meaning 'disease,' and 'logos,' referring to 'study') is not a sport for the timid, and certainly not for those so scrupulous about rules and order that they demand consistency in all things.

diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.