There has been a strong history in health to name ailments following the physician that initially identified or publicized on that illness. Sometimes the physician called the illness after themselves which could be regarded as to some degree egotistic and at other times it was provided with a doctors name by their peers in acknowledgement of the work, which will be regarded as an honor. Recently there has been a trend away from naming illnesses after doctors.

Many reasons exist for for this tendency. These days research is more likely to be conducted by teams rather than individuals working on your own, therefore it is difficult to credit a disease to only a single person. In some cases previously credit for a disease has gone for the wrong individual and the disorder appeared to be explained by another person prior to when the one which has got the credit.

A condition that is called after a doctor does not describe the actual pathology or the underpinning biological mechanisms with the disease process which can be a lot more help. By way of example, it can be relatively simple to know what conditions like acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) or even whooping cough are simply based on the actual name. If these illnesses were called after doctors, it would convey absolutely nothing with the underlying process. In several situations there may be several illnesses named after the same person or the have the name. As an example, there are twelve different illnesses named after the neurologist, Dr Cushing.

At times a disorder which is called after an individual has something concerning their history that it is not anymore appropriate to name the disease after them. One example is, there was Reiter’s syndrome which had been named after Dr Hans Reiter who had been afterwards charged with war crimes for his medical experiments conducted in a Nazi concentration prison. The condition that has been named as Reiter’s syndrome has become more generally called Reactive arthritis. Likewise, Wegener’s Granulomatosis was called for Friedrich Wegener who has been a Nazi doctor. The name of the disease is currently more commonly known as granulomatosis with polyangiitis after his Nazi ties were made public.

One more case in point is Severs disease that is a painful disorder with the heel bone in youngsters that is self-limiting. It was initially written about by J Severs back in 1912. This isn't a disease, but the use of that language is most likely harmful to children. It is probably more appropriately named calcaneal apophysitis because the heel bone is technically referred to as the calcaneus and the pathology is an inflammatory reaction of the apophysis (or growth plate).

The WHO has recently released guidelines for the calling of new diseases by having an focus on a best practice not to name conditions after doctors or geographical regions in order to prevent the effects on those individuals and also the regions as well as their economies and to avoid stigmatization of individuals and parts. The very best procedures says that a condition term should really contain a generic descriptive term that will be based on the symptoms that the disease will cause and more specific descriptive words when robust details are available on how the illness starts or behaves.