Comment on Why don't they have simpler names for brain disorders, where perhaps even the person suffering the disorder might be able to remember the term themself?

• over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Frontotemporal Dementia…

  FD

  Problem solved. /s

  Yeah I get the whole marketing strategy thing… ☹️

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  • ByteJunk@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Bro has dementia. You could call it the most memorable, epic name ever, and he’d still forget all about it in 10 minutes. It’s a fucked up disease.

    But as to your gripe with the name, Frontotemporal dementia is a pretty decent name.

    Even if you know nothing about medicine, you’ll understand it’s some type of dementia, and immediately get a very good image of how it affects a patient.

    If you’re more familiar with medicine and the brain, it will also tell you what regions these specific types of dementia affect, giving you clues as to what brain functions could be most impaired.

    Thank god medicine has moved away from eponyms, because Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or Binswanger disease, or Fahr disease, are much much worse. If you’re not familiar, you’d have no clue if they’re a type of dementia or a problem on your anus.

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  • XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Sure, because what we need in medicine is more acronyms to occlude meaning.

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    • over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I’m pretty sure that if a patient came in slurring their words and all they could basically remember to say was ‘I can’t remember much, but my last doctor said I have FTD’, then if the acronym was standardized, every doctor would know what they mean.

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      • MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I think doctors just ask what day it is or “who is the prime minister” to work out what’s wrong. When I found my neighbour wandering along the street unable to find her own front door I understood her problem without an acronym.

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      • XeroxCool@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I can tell you that doctors will not trust the claims of anyone slurring their words. If they can’t identify the person and pull up their records, they’ll do their own diagnostics.

        What problem are you trying to solve? In what instance have you experienced an actual doctor say they wish there was an acronym for everything? Frontotemporal dementia is 3 precise bits of data. Two bits tell you what type of dementia, one bit to tell the majority of doctors this isn’t their specialty and just “dementia” is sufficient. And, more importantly, is rooted in Latin - the common root of medical terminology. It’s pronunciation carries further across the world than writing.

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