The Hanover Collaboration

There is some peculiar usage in English with respect to (WRT) health issues. When your body is infected by a parisite you might say “I have crabs.” That usage seems completely natural. Then the verb, “to have,” is extended to conditions also. “I have laryngitis” or “I have athlete’s foot.” or even “I have a pain in my knee” This seems like a natural extention of the previous case. Considering the fact that “I have a problem” is standard usage and “A problem presents itself to me.” is an akward conjugation, I think we should stick with it. I can’t think of anything better.

But this is rapidly starts breaking down when we start describing less binary conditions. While you could have a case of variable severity, you either have crabs or you don’t. But consider, “I have high blood pressure.” Ordinarily, that would mean that my blood pressure is abnormally high right? But since we use “have” with conditions, that sentence carries with it a lot of baggage. That baggage is potentially very snaggy in some situations. It makes “high blood pressure” into a medical condition. I very much preffer “My blood pressure is high.” But come on, higher than what? How about “My blood pressure is typically %110 of normal.”

Still don’t see the problem? How about syndromes? We use the same language to describe the having the flu as having a syndrome. It gives a syndrome—just collection of symptoms (“symptom” is even to strong of a word)—a realness as something that you can physically have. I don’t think the problem here is with syndromes themselves or the science surrounding them. I think it is great that people are documenting the sort of states that are correlated under certain circumstances. I think the real problem here is simply language usage. How’s about this for a start “I exhibit uncredible witness syndrome.” Or “My state is largely consistent with uncredible witness syndrome.”

Now we are getting close to the truth of the matter. We know very little about mental health or about any relationship that goes through the brain. We’ve got a vague feel for what goes on where and a few regulatory chemicals and a tiny bit about how neurons work but that’s really all. So we document all we can and give things helpful names. The crucial mistake is pretending that we understand it because we can refer to it by name (personally, I blame Aristotle). For instance, when someone has some sort of mental problem, i.e. they exhibit unwanted mental abnormalities, what happens is they try a lot of different drugs. If a drug has a positive affect on the abnormality, they now know what the problem is. It is the problem that that drug treats! I know someone who is often abnormally paranoid and depressed. She has been called many things (among them schitsophrenic) solely because she responded to certain medications.

But this isn’t very diagnostic. Consider the fact that everyone responds pretty well to cocaine for instance. The doctors have realized this since so many diverse things are being treated with practically unabashed amphetimines. Amphetimines are perhaps going to be a recurring theme here.

Let me get back to the thread from which I’ve strayed. Let’s not pretend we understand what is going on. To that end, let’s use language that is more acurate. Rather than saying “The boy has ADHD” perhaps we should say that “The boy responds well to amphetimines.” But doesn’t pretty much everyone respond well to amphetimines? Well, yes, they pretty much do.

¹ As an aside, the only worse verb that is worse than “to have” is “to be.” It is too broad a usage. “Tom is crazy.” “That girl is overweight.” “That whore is HIV positive” (I always say “has HIV” seeing how it is a virus that you carry around). I remember in Spanish class learning about whether to use ser or estar with gordo(fat). I thought it was kind of neat that Spanish with less than half of the verbs of English would have two words for “to be” one describing atributes like “I am American”(ser) and another to describe conditions “I am hungry” (estar). It turns out that you can use either for fatness. Using Google hits to see which is more popular tells that it depends on conjugation and gender. Of course, context matters too. Teammates seeing Ulrich in the spring surely would say “Jan Esta gordo!” while if asked about Cosmo’s girth, I would say “Cosmo es gordo!” For loco (crazy) with regard to people, again you can use either but estar dominates usage.