romancing the disease

The Most Helpful Princess brought this book review to my attention:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2004200707_alzheimers26.html

“The Myth of Alzheimer’s: What You Aren’t Being Told About Today’s Most Dreaded Diagnosis” by Peter Whitehouse M.D. with Daniel George, St. Martin’s Press.

The book takes a look at Alzheimer’s and asks if it is a disease or just a part of getting older. That it is just a collection of symptoms and drug companies have pushed for a new disease to treat. This is reminiscent of what some have said about a bipolar diagnosis or other social anxiety diseases that drug companies have advertised on TV.

Makes us need to be suspicious anytime we hear about a new disease or diagnosis… Yes medicine is getting more accurate, I guess and genetics is helping isolate causes of things, but the Drug companies are funding a lot a research and they have a lot to gain the more diseases there are to treat. Reminds me of plant and animal species being differentiated by nothing more than geography. The Georgia horny toad is the same as the NY horny toad. (perhaps they croak in a different accent.) (this really only bothers me when people talk about the number of species disappearing from the planet.)

The book also talks about stigma of certain diseases.

The book review talked about TB and AIDS being highly stigmatizing diseases. However, The Most Helpful Princess informed me that TB, while it is stigmatized now as something you want to avoid it was a highly romanticized in the 19th century and thought of as beautiful or in some cases a spark for creativity. She said that perhaps it was romanticized because at that time TB was something that touched everyone. It was a way for culture and the individual to survive mentally. If you have to get an unpreventable, incurable disease, the least we can do as a culture is say that it makes you look sexy. It is just plain polite. Perhaps as Western medicine advances and protocols like quarantining people with infectious diseases get more pronounced we can isolate those ill individuals and they become culturally stigmatized?

A very brief search of the internet for articles just mentioned the Western 19th century as carrying the exhalation of the TB patrons. I did not get into any greek historical documents, but while there was mention of the disease being wide spread in ancient Greece, there was no mention of a romanticized version. I believe it was the Wikipedia, the purporting encyclopedia article that proposes that supposedly Hippocrates told his students not to treat people with advanced TB because they always die and it would damage their rep. So it isn’t just the advance of Western medicine that can let culture create a stigma.

Also, I wonder if the black plague was ever romanticized? It certainly is not now, but we know a lot more about it. I ask TMHP (the most helpful princess) about this. She read a book on the 14th century a while back, I think focusing on black plague. Perhaps she has some answers? Another thing is that TB wasn’t considered communicable until the very late 19th century (give or take 50years?). (for a disease that has been around for thousands of years, that amazes me! The fact that it is a slow disease and the fact that people can be non symptomatic carriers played a huge role.)

This makes me wonder what other diseases have been romanced and what are the conditions that create a romanticized disease? Manic-Depression I think would be one that is often romanticized with all the artistic creativity that can out of the manic phases. I wonder if autism has a chance to become romanticized. Autism, I believe, is another catch-all name for a set of symptoms without a known cause. I’ve read articles where the claim is made that autism is also not a disease, instead it is merely a manifestation of being different and not something to be cured. Many with autism have tremendous gifts in math and in music and autism is on the rise. I think that one out of 100 babies in the Northwest are being born with autism now… and no one knows why. Are these conditions to create a romanticized disease or state of being?

One big difference between TB and autism is that autism doesn’t kill you. Another is that it may be no more a disease than having blue eyes. I’m also not saying that autism is being romanticized or stigmatized. I’m just wondering out loud in print.

But Alzheimer’s is a stigmatized “disease”. And it may or may not be a disease depending on how you look at it. So you can’t let the stigmatization make your definitions… I suppose this is one of the themes of the book.

Tags: alzhiemer's, autism, books, definitions, diseases, medicine, plague, stigmatizations, TB, The Seattle Times, TMHP