How should new diseases get their name?
There's been a strong history in medicine and surgery to name diseases after the physician that initially referred to or publicized on that condition. Sometimes the physician named the disease after themselves which could be considered relatively conceited and other times it was provided with a physician’s name by their peers in recognition of their work, which may be considered an honour. Recently there has been a movement away from labeling illnesses after doctors.
Many reasons exist for for this tendency. Nowadays scientific studies are almost certainly going to be completed by groups and not individuals working by themselves, so it is tricky to credit a condition to only one individual. Sometimes in past times recognition for a disorder has gone for the wrong individual and the disorder might have been explained by someone else sooner than the one which gets the credit.
A condition that is called after an individual doesn't describe the actual pathology or the underlying biological components of the disease process which can be a great deal more benefit. For example, it really is not too difficult to be aware what illnesses such as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (or AIDS) as well as whooping cough are just based on the actual name. If these types of conditions were called after individuals, it would convey nothing with the underlying process. In a number of cases there may be multiple disorders called after the same individual or the same name. As an example, you can find twelve unique illnesses named after the neurologist, Dr Cushing.
In some cases a condition that is called after an individual has something about their history that it's no longer acceptable to name the disorder after them. For instance, there was a condition, Reiter’s syndrome which was called after Dr Reiter who was subsequently convicted of war crimes regarding his medical experiments conducted in a Nazi concentration camp. The problem that has been named as Reiter’s syndrome is currently more generally named Reactive arthritis. Likewise, Wegener’s Granulomatosis was called for Friedrich Wegener who has been a Nazi doctor. The name of the condition is currently more commonly known as granulomatosis with polyangiitis after Dr Wegener's Nazi links were found.
One more example is Severs disease that is a painful disorder with the calcaneus bone in youngsters which is self-limiting. It was initially described by James Severs in 1912. It's not a disease, but the utilization of that terminology is potentially harmful to kids. It's probably more appropriately called calcaneal apophysitis since the heel bone is technically named the calcaneus and the pathology is an irritation of the apophysis (or growth area).
The World Health Organization has recently produced principles on the naming of new illnesses with the focus on a best practice not to name disorders after physicians or geographical regions to be able to lessen the effects on those people and also the regions as well as their economies and to avoid stigmatization of people and regions. The best procedures says that an illness name should really consist of a generic descriptive name which might be depending on the signs and symptoms the illness will cause and more specific descriptive phrases after robust information is available on how the disease starts or behaves.