Eponyms and Alternatives
There is a trend away from the use of eponymous disease names towards a medical name that describes either the cause or the primary signs. Reasons for this include:
- The name confers no information other than the historical.
- There can be a Western bias to the choices.
- History sometimes shows the credit should have gone to a different person.
- Different countries may have different eponyms for the same disease.
- Several eponyms may turn out to be the same disease (example: amyloid degeneration is also called Abercrombie's disease, Abercrombie's syndrome, and Virchow's syndrome).
Arguments for maintaining eponyms include:
- The name may be more memorable and shorter than the medical one (the latter requiring abbreviation to its acronym)
- Sometimes the medical name proves to be incorrect.
- The syndrome may have more than one cause, yet it remains useful to consider it as a whole.
- It continues to give respect to a person who may otherwise have been forgotten.
Read more about this topic: List Of Eponymously Named Diseases
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