Eponyms
The main thing I find annoying about medicine is the extremely high number of diseases, tests, and so forth named after individuals. I find it almost impossible to keep them straight: the Hall-Pike test for vertigo, Finkelstein's test for de Quervain's tendonitis... you get the idea. When I'm discussing a case with a fellow MD who starts throwing these terms around, I find myself nodding my head trying to look like I recognize these terms, murmuring vague comments, doing anything rather than look clueless. So, when I got a consultation letter from an orthopedist referring to "
Parsonage-Turner syndrome," I first rolled my eyes but then turned to Google.
My patient had come to me complaining of pain in the right shoulder and difficulty lifting her arm, which had begun rather suddenly and without any history of injury. I had no idea what it was (orthopedic medicine is not my strong point), so referred her to the specialist since her examination did, indeed, show that she could not lift her arm higher than 75 degrees - not even to shoulder level.
Well. It turns out that Parsonage-Turner syndrome is known by multiple other aliases including "Feinberg�s syndrome," "Tinel�s syndrome" and "Kiloh-Nevin syndrome III." Quite a few clinicians have staked a claim to describing this particular problem. A concise description of it would be muscle wasting and weakness in the shoulder girdle due to neuritis, or nerve inflammation - a rather unusual cause, as muscle weakness here is more likely to be connected to nerve problems caused by herniated discs or arthritis in the neck. At least that's my impression.
I felt vindicated, however, as the first sentence of the web page describes Parsonage-Turner syndrome as "a now obsolete eponym once used to indicate many forms of cryptogenic neurologic atrophy of the shoulder and cervical plexus". Obsolete! If clinicians would eradicate all such terminology, life would be easier for me and, I suspect, for many other memory-challenged physicians. I have enough trouble remembering the names of actual people I meet, let alone diseases that have eponyms glued to them like labels.
posted by Dr. Alice at #
