This blog title is from the famous line in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:  “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”  Shakespeare also wrote in Hamlet, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  The following guest post from my colleague, Rich Evans in Arizona, focuses on the discovery that a medical diagnosis — being labeled with a name — can affect our thinking and in turn our health.  Here’s Rich…

Names are powerful.  Lincoln, Mount Everest, the Yankees, bring forth strong associations for each of us, depending upon what we have learned and accepted from the opinions of others and from our own experiences.  On July 29th, in The New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope reported on a rather courageous research report by medical scientists recommending changes in the approach to detection and treatment of cancer, including “eliminating the word cancer entirely from some common diagnoses”.  A significant point in the report was that too often the “cancer” label led the patient to an assumptive conclusion: if the word cancer was mentioned in the patient’s diagnosis, then the probability of death was assumed.  As a result, often more drastic procedures were undergone than were necessary.

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