This question comes from watching the TV right now, and they’re talking about Bruce Willis. I feel bad for him, I really do…
Bruce Willis apparently has what they call Frontotemporal Dementia. That’s a tounge twister mouthful for most average people, I can only assume Mr. Willis probably can’t even remember the name of his own condition…
Why isn’t there a ‘patient-friendly’ easy to remember name for disorders that literally affect a person’s brain and memory?
Like shit, I bet most people wouldn’t know what polytetrafluoroethylene is, but they gave everyone a simple name to know it by, teflon.
So, why don’t they have simpler terms for brain disorders so the suffering patient might be able to talk to their own doctor privately…?
That’s a type of dementia.
So the answer the question is they do.
Yes, I get that. The word dementia itself has 3 syllables, they can’t come up with a shorter and easier to remember and speak 2 syllable version?
They shortened polytetrafluoroethylene down to 2 syllables, so why not help those suffering brain disorders and memory issues with simpler terminology?
You ever ask a person suffering Alzheimer’s how to actually spell their own condition? They’ll probably be either like ‘old timers’ or just a frustrated ‘fuck you’
People with alzheimers don’t know they have alzheimers. That’s kinda the whole issue of the disease.
Do you have much experience with people with Alzheimer’s? It’s not a question of keeping the spelling simple. They lose their own names. And anyway what is this scenario where any damn thing depends on their ability to spell their clinical condition?
No, not specifically Alzheimer’s anyways.
But for almost the past decade, I’ve been helping care for people that have had stroke, partly paralyzed, have brain damage, mute and unable to speak from birth, etc.
Thank you for asking though. I actually do have genuine care for disabled people. Even if I’m not a complete expert in the field, I do what I can. They don’t have many people actually willing to help.
Does it hurt to think about ways to help better? Like what if something happens, and I can no longer help?
No it doesn’t hurt. I’m really just trying to answer your question. Why don’t we have better names? Because they’re for the clinicians, who need the terms to be precise, not easy to pronounce. And literally nothing is easy enough for a patient with dementia or Alzheimer’s to remember.
They shortened the name of PTFE to Teflon because they wanted to sell it. Once there’s a market for frontotemporal dementia it will get a short name too.
Frontotemporal Dementia…
FD or FTD
Problem solved. /s
Yeah I get the whole marketing strategy thing… ☹️
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.
Sure, because what we need in medicine is more acronyms to occlude meaning.
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.
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.
No shit, I already stated that most medical terms have Latin roots.
What sane person you know that speaks Latin?
What mentally handicapped people speak Latin?..
Asking questions is great. Testing ideas is fantastic. Discussion is healthy. Getting so combative and argumentative with repaonses to ideas you’re posing as the obvious solution that 8 billion people wandering the Earth now have missed? That’s nowhere near as constructive for the world is it will be for you, in an inverse manner, in a few years.
Latin is used BECAUSE it is dead. It means the terms don’t drift. It also lets the names/terms be a descriptive as necessary.
Asking a doctor to memorise some Latin words is a lot easier and less error prone than a sea of acronyms.