[Kalium]

> I haven't read the book, but from your summary it sounds like the argument is that for illnesses that we don't yet understand well enough to cure or even have a potential cure, we should use a different word. That sounds pedantic.

Yes. You are absolutely correct! It is pedantic.

It's also pedantry in pursuit of a point. By characterizing a group of symptoms as a disease, we coerce it into the mental model of a germ-caused disease. Which is to say there's one unifying and underlying cause, which can be ideally be addressed in a unified way that reflects the singular cause.

Szasz would not agree that Cystic Fibrosis is an illness. He would argue that it's thousands of illnesses with the same set of symptoms. His point would be that calling Cystic Fibrosis "an illness" is misleading and confuses people by denying the common understanding of a word.

The underlying point from Szasz being that illnesses need to be conceptualized in a meaningfully narrow way so that causes can be identified and a way to address them found. Otherwise medicine might wind up deeply invested in a quest to cure coughing and ignoring what coughing might be a symptom of.

Again, you're absolutely correct. The point at hand is incredibly pedantic. Might it also, perhaps, be a useful one as well?