Nominalization: Is Disease a Noun or a Verb?

In the book “God is a Verb”, Rabbi David Cooper makes the argument that the divine supernatural existence called “God”, is best thought of not as a thing but rather as a process. The rabbi suggests that rather than thinking about what is referred to as God as being some kind of “person” who lives in clouds, it might be more accurate to contemplate it as a movement or action, flowing through everything in the cosmos, from the smallest smallest subatomic quanta to the largest galaxies.

This dynamic of naming processes, making nouns out of verbs, in essence “thing-ifying” actions is called “nominalization” and it is nowhere more evident (and reaches a particularly egregious zenith) in the realm of medicine and medicinal diagnostics.

According to Wikipedia, medical diagnosis is the “…process of determining which disease…explains a person’s symptoms and signs.” Unfortunately, that is absolutely NOT what a medical diagnosis is. Rather, medical diagnosis, the major component of the “doctor’s office visit” is nothing more than a description of a patient’s symptoms and complaints recited back to the patient in Latin. This repetition of symptomology in the language of Ancient Rome is then proclaimed a “disease” and a protocol ensues that attempts to somehow “treat” the process being described. Not cure, but “treat” because, as Dr. Andrew Weil reminds us in his book “Spontaneous Healing” when it comes to degenerative diseases, no cures are possible. And of course, he is correct. No cure is possible because no one can “cure” a description!

Despite the nominalization of symptomology with the nomenclature of disease, symptoms are in actuality, processes, not “things”, which in general must be heard, touched, felt, smelt or tasted. The diagnostics that take these processes and freeze them into nouns magically creates a tangible, palpable solid something that does not in actuality exist.

What we call symptoms are biological dynamics. They are not a “thing” but rather a “happening” and even though they are said to be named or “diagnosed”, in actuality they are merely being described. In this fashion, the formation of stiff fibers in various places in the body (verb) becomes “Multiple Sclerosis” (noun), a bending and inflamed spine (verb) becomes “Ankylosing Spondylitis” (noun), and a hardening of the sides of the spine following a lack of muscle nourishment (verb) becomes Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (noun). Verbs have now become nouns and processes have become diseases. It is at this point that a privileged, authorized expert is supposed to be able to impact the processes they have described.

Aside from its inherent deceit, the medical artifice of diagnosing disease (i.e. turning a dynamic process into a static thing) serves to dis-empower patients. It makes them feel as if they literally “have” something bad and the natural inclination is that something must be removed by a someone. And of course the doctor is positioned as that someone. However, because an action cannot be removed, it is simply ceased, it does not require a medical solution. You don’t need a drug or a surgical procedure to stop running or reading or speaking, you just stop doing it. In the same way, you don’t need a prescription or surgery to stop the formation of fibers, the bending of the spine or the hardening of the vertebra, you simply stop doing whatever is causing the effect.

So, if we are “disease-ing” how can we restore our selves to a “non-disease-ing” state? Well, first of all we can challenge our nominalization. We can reverse our fabricated noun “thing” back into its accurate verb “process” by asking ourselves: how am I doing the process? In what way am I (nominalization)? How am I sclerosis-ing? How am I spondylosis-ing? How am I disease-ing? We link effects to causes by asking what are we doing (cause), so that disease-ing (effect) occurs.

Then we simply change the activities that results in the processes. If you want to stop running, you simply stop moving your legs. If you want to stop reading, you put the book away and if you want to stop speaking, you close your mouth. Likewise in the body, the way we stop the processes that have been medically nominalized/diagnosed as disease is by stopping the activities that result in those processes. Fortunately there are not a lot of activities that impact bodily processes. We ingest (eat and drink), we breathe, we move, we think and we emote. In the same way that we stop running by ceasing to move our legs and we cease speaking by closing our mouth, we stop inflammation, sclerosis, the formation of fibers or any other symptom/process by changing what we ingest, adjusting how we breathe ,modifying our movement and refining our thoughts and feelings.