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…?
Im sure there are plenty of abbreviations people make up for their disorders. While one person might be okay with it, others might see it as a slur of sorts. I worked with someone with down syndrome that called himself and his similarily affected friends “downies” but you can be fucking sure as hell that others might be very offended by that.
I guess you could create “official” abreviations somehow, but even those would not be accepted by everyone i am sure.
That’s exactly what I mean, standardize some shorthand versions of mental/memory disorders where perhaps even the sufferer might even be able to remember, speak and/or spell it out, standardized across all of the medical community.
Hey, the chemical industry had no problem making teflon a standardized name, everyone knows it by just those 2 syllables…
And I’m pretty sure I’ve never met a person that considered the shorthand version of polytetrafluoroethylene as offensive.
Isn’t teflon a brand name? Not standardized, just capitalized.
Yes, Teflon is a brand name, that’s not exactly my point. My point is that basically everyone knows what Teflon is, because of the short name.
The only thing more well known across the world is LOL, and nobody standardized that, it just came to be as the internet grew.
Is it that difficult to give brain damaged people a simple three letter acronym like FTD that’s easy to remember if they have to talk with emergency services or other doctors?
But FTD is used by people to talk about frontotemporal dementia.
However, it isn’t an acronym, but an abbreviation. Abbreviations are generally not much easier to remember and even more meaningless to normal people. The reason they wouldn’t use the abbreviation in the documentary is because abbreviations are generally considered even more complex to both remember and understand than ‘long’ words. Only when a loooot of people know and talk about a disease does an abbreviation or other name become mainstream enough (thinking about flu for influenza etc) that it actually becomes useful to have the shorter name. Even at a conference about brain diseases you would only use FTD after giving the full term first so people know what you are talking about.
But yes, if Bruce goes to a clinic and says he has FTD they will know what’s up (or google the abbreviation).