The Name Is the Product

An Essay on Diagnosis

Synopsis

The International Classification of Diseases contains over 70,000 diagnostic codes. The overwhelming majority of illness traces to four causes: toxic exposure, nutritional deficiency, electromagnetic radiation, and stress. Something is converting four causes into seventy thousand products — and that something is the act of naming. This essay, a companion to Four Causes, Seventy Thousand Diseases, examines what a diagnosis does the moment it is applied: how it converts a living process into a billable entity, imports a prognosis that can become self-fulfilling, forecloses the investigation into actual causes, and recruits the patient as an enforcer of the very system that stopped asking why they were sick. Drawing on the ICD coding architecture, the history of diagnostic reclassification (polio, AIDS, COVID-19, SIDS), the nocebo research, and the financial structure of modern medicine, the essay argues that the disease name is not a scientific discovery. It is a commercial product — and it is the mechanism by which the medical system sustains itself while the population it serves grows sicker every year.

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In 1992, a man was diagnosed with metastatic oesophageal cancer that had spread throughout his body. His doctors gave him months to live. His family prepared. He deteriorated rapidly and died on schedule. The autopsy found a single two-centimetre nodule on his liver. No metastasis. No cancer consuming his body. His physician admitted he did not know the pathological cause of death.

The diagnosis killed him. The name—”metastatic oesophageal cancer”—carried a prognosis, and the prognosis carried a death sentence, and the man’s body obeyed. Daniel Roytas, documenting this case in Can You Catch a Cold?, describes it as “a lethal strain of nocebo.” The researchers speculated that the expectation of cancer, not the cancer itself, ended his life.

Roytas also documents a case that runs the mechanism in both directions. A man known only as “Mr Wright” was diagnosed with lymphosarcoma—cancer of the lymph nodes and bone marrow. Orange-sized tumours riddled his body. His doctors gave him months. Mr Wright had heard promising things about an experimental substance called Krebiozen and requested injections. His tumours shrank dramatically. He returned to good health. Then he heard news reports debunking Krebiozen. The tumours returned. His doctors, in desperation, told him the original dose had simply been too weak, and began injecting saline while telling him it was high-dose Krebiozen. The cancer disappeared completely. Months later, a peak medical body stated conclusively that Krebiozen was useless. Mr Wright’s cancer returned within days, and he died shortly after.

The name, the expectation, the prognosis—each time, the body followed the story it was given. The tumours obeyed the narrative, not the treatment. The saline worked when the name said it would. The drug failed when the name said it would.

Start there. Not with the financial architecture or the billing codes—those come later. Start with what a name does to a single person in a single room. Because that room is where the entire system begins.

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Reader Allen, commenting on my earlier essay Four Causes, Seventy Thousand Diseases, identified the mechanism precisely. Disease categorisation, he wrote, “forestalls any useful forensic analysis.” The coding “often defines, or at least influences, the prognosis.” And this, he added, is intentional in a wholly financialised medicine.

Allen was pointing at the hinge. In Four Causes, I argued that the overwhelming majority of illness can be traced to four fundamental causes: toxic exposure, nutritional deficiency, electromagnetic radiation, and stress. The International Classification of Diseases contains over 70,000 diagnostic codes. Four causes. Seventy thousand products. Something other than science is driving the multiplication, and the mechanism that makes it possible is the act of naming.

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A child develops a runny nose, a cough, and a mild fever. These are descriptions of what the body is doing: clearing, expelling, heating. A mother watching this sees a process. A doctor seeing the same child produces a diagnosis. The runny nose becomes “allergic rhinitis.” The cough becomes “acute upper respiratory infection.” If it persists, “asthma.”

Each name carries an ICD code. Each code activates a treatment protocol. Each protocol generates a prescription. Each prescription generates revenue.

Nobody asked what the child ate yesterday. Nobody checked the new mattress off-gassing in the bedroom, the mould behind the bathroom tiles, the household cleaning products stored under the sink. Nobody asked because the name, once applied, made those questions unnecessary. “Acute upper respiratory infection” has a protocol. The protocol does not include an environmental investigation. It includes amoxicillin.

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Naming operates on the person, on the investigation, and on the financial system. These three dimensions reinforce each other, and they need to be taken in turn.

The person.

“My joints are inflamed” is a statement about what is happening. “I have rheumatoid arthritis” is a statement about what you possess. The shift from verb to noun—from process to entity—changes the relationship between a person and their experience. Inflamed joints might be responding to a dietary change, a toxic exposure, a prolonged emotional crisis. Rheumatoid arthritis is a thing. It has a name, a code, a prognosis, a specialist, a drug, and a support group. The question “why are my joints inflamed?” becomes “how do I manage my rheumatoid arthritis?” The first question is open. The second is closed.

Over time, the name absorbs the person. “I am diabetic.” “I am epileptic.” “I am bipolar.” We do not say “I am broken-legged” when we fracture a bone—that is a temporary event, not an identity. But chronic disease names are designed as permanent identifiers. A person who “has lupus” joins lupus support groups, follows lupus research, donates to lupus foundations, organises their entire relationship with their body around the management of lupus. To question whether the symptoms might be better understood as a response to specific environmental factors is to threaten not just a diagnosis but an identity, a community, and the story they use to make sense of their suffering. The name does not merely describe the patient. It recruits them. They become invested in the very label that forecloses the investigation into what is actually making them unwell.

The case of the man with “metastatic oesophageal cancer” is the extreme expression of this dynamic. The name imported a trajectory. The trajectory became self-fulfilling. The body, recruited by the prognosis, executed it. The tumour that was supposed to justify the death was not there.

The investigation.

Allen identified this dimension, and it is the one that matters most.

A crime scene investigator arrives at a scene and begins asking questions. What happened here? When? What are the possible explanations? What evidence supports each? The investigation is open. The conclusion is pending.

A filing clerk arrives at the same scene. The clerk’s job is to categorise the event, assign it a case number, file it in the appropriate drawer, and move on. The event has been processed.

Modern diagnosis operates as a filing system, not an investigation. The doctor working within the current system has seven to fifteen minutes per patient. In that time, the system requires a diagnosis, a treatment plan, a prescription, and documentation sufficient for billing. There is no time for forensic inquiry even if the doctor were inclined toward it. The scheduling is built around the assumption that naming will happen quickly and investigation will not happen at all. Seven minutes is enough time to assign a code. It is not enough time to understand a person.

The moment a name is applied, the question shifts from “why is this happening?” to “how do we treat this?” The first looks backward—toward environment, exposure, nutrition, stress, history. It is open-ended and potentially threatening to powerful interests because it might implicate industrial pollution, pharmaceutical side effects, electromagnetic radiation, or food supply contamination. The second looks forward—toward drug selection, dosage, follow-up schedules. It is contained, predictable, and profitable.

Florence Nightingale understood this 165 years ago. She wrote that there are no specific diseases, only specific disease conditions. She observed that when wards were overcrowded and poorly ventilated, patients’ ordinary fevers progressed to typhoid and then typhus—conditions the medical establishment treated as distinct entities caused by distinct agents. Nightingale saw no new agent. She saw deteriorating conditions producing predictable results. Her response to the germ doctrine was characteristically direct: it was, she said, the thing “bringing the medical profession to grief.”

The reform Nightingale anticipated never came. The naming system deepened instead. Each symptom cluster was assigned a name. Each name generated a protocol. Each protocol generated revenue.

Dr. Ulric Williams, writing in the 1930s, described the result: “Orthodox ‘diagnosis’ means little more than giving symptoms a name; very often, as experience has demonstrated, a wrong one. It has been proved that the most skilful diagnostician, with all the resources of a modern hospital at his disposal, is correct in only forty-eight per cent of cases in even naming the symptoms; and naming the symptoms does nothing to reveal the true cause.”

Ninety years later, the system names with extraordinary precision—70,000 codes and counting—and investigates with extraordinary reluctance. Williams also identified the deeper error: “The first great departure from principle is made when doctors look in sick bodies for causes. They never discover them; for the primary cause is never in the body—that’s where effects appear. The cause will be found in the mind or the manner of living.” The naming system enshrines this departure. It directs all attention toward the body, toward the symptoms, toward the effects—and away from the environment, the exposures, the manner of living that produced them.

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The naming conventions vary, but they accomplish the same foreclosure through different linguistic means.

Latin suffixes redescribe ordinary processes as pathology. “Rhinitis” is a runny nose. “Dermatitis” is inflamed skin. The Latin adds no information. It adds authority and a billing code. A mother describing a runny nose is reporting something ordinary. A doctor diagnosing rhinitis is producing something medical.

Eponymous names borrow the authority of a credentialed discoverer. Parkinson’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease. Crohn’s disease. These names tell you nothing about causation. They tell you that a doctor once described a symptom cluster. The proper noun makes the disease feel established and settled, even when the mechanism remains unknown—as it does for all three examples.

Acronyms create technical distance. IBS. COPD. ADHD. MS. They function as brand names, compressing complex and poorly understood symptom clusters into tidy product labels.

“Idiopathic” means “of unknown cause.” Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. The term is presented as a sub-classification, as though it narrows the diagnosis. It is an admission dressed as precision. We do not know why this is happening, but we have given the not-knowing a name—and the name has a code.

“Syndrome” is a collection of symptoms that tend to occur together. Chronic fatigue syndrome. Metabolic syndrome. These are descriptions wearing the costume of diagnoses. They say: these things happen together, and we have named the togetherness. The name substitutes for knowledge. The code generates revenue regardless.

“Autoimmune” smuggles a causal mechanism into the label. It asserts that the body is attacking itself. The medical establishment acknowledges it does not fully understand this process, yet the label pre-empts investigation into what external factors—toxic exposure, pharmaceutical injury, nutritional depletion—might actually be driving the symptoms. As Lester and Parker observe, the subsequent creation of “auto-inflammatory diseases” as a further subcategory, distinguished only by the claim that inflammation occurs “for unknown reasons,” illustrates how naming proliferates without advancing understanding. Each new category generates new codes, new specialist referrals, new drugs, and new billing pathways.

The conventions vary. The conversion is the same: a description of what is happening becomes a declaration of what the patient has. The verb becomes a noun. The process becomes a product.

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The cases where names were deliberately changed to serve institutional interests make the mechanism visible.

The history of polio is the clearest example. Jim West, cited by Mark Gober, documents that “from ancient times to the early twentieth century, the symptoms and physiology of paralytic poliomyelitis were often described as the results of poisoning. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that the word ‘poliomyelitis’ became the designation for the paralytic effects of severe poisoning and polio-like diseases assumed to be germ-caused.” The name changed. The paralysis did not. The new name directed all investigation toward a “virus” and away from the arsenicals, lead compounds, and organophosphate pesticides that had been producing paralytic symptoms for centuries.

Then the vaccine arrived, and the naming system was adjusted again. Before the polio vaccine was introduced, the diagnostic threshold for a polio epidemic was 20 cases per 100,000 population. After the vaccine programme began, this was changed to 35 cases per 100,000—nearly a 75 per cent increase in the number of cases needed to declare an epidemic. Simultaneously, the paralysis duration required for a diagnosis of paralytic poliomyelitis was changed from 24 hours to 60 days. As William Trebing documents in Good-Bye Germ Theory, state health department records show that as diagnosed polio decreased, spinal meningitis increased proportionately. The symptoms were identical. The names were different. The vaccine appeared to work.

In India, the situation continued. The country was declared “polio-free” in 2012, yet cases of “non-polio acute flaccid paralysis” (NPAFP) surged. Indian medical doctors writing in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics reported that NPAFP was “clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly,” and that the NPAFP rate increased in proportion to the number of oral polio vaccine doses received in each area.

George Bernard Shaw, who served on a London health committee, encountered the same technique with smallpox: “I learned how the credit of vaccination is kept up statistically by diagnosing all the re-vaccinated cases as pustular eczema, varioloid or what not—except smallpox.”

AIDS follows the same pattern. Nancy Turner Banks, a Harvard Medical School graduate, describes it as “a collection of twenty-nine old diseases, clustered together, re-branded, and given a new scary label.” Peter Duesberg demonstrated the mechanism: tuberculosis without a positive HIV test is diagnosed as tuberculosis; tuberculosis with a positive HIV test is diagnosed as AIDS. Same symptoms. Same patient. Different name. Different treatment. Different billing code.

COVID-19 completed the trajectory. The WHO declared in August 2020 that a confirmed case required “laboratory confirmation of COVID-19 infection, irrespective of clinical signs and symptoms.” Mark Bailey, in The Final Pandemic, describes what this abolished: the centuries-old diagnostic process in which a practitioner takes a history, performs an examination, constructs a differential diagnosis, and orders investigations to narrow the possibilities. All of this was replaced by a test result. A healthy person could now be declared ill. The name—detached from examination, detached from symptoms, detached from clinical judgement—was the disease. In the United States, hospitals received a 20 per cent Medicare bonus for COVID-19 diagnoses and additional payments for the use of remdesivir. The diagnostic code was directly monetised. The financial incentive shaped the naming, and the naming shaped everything that followed.

In each case, the name was not a discovery. It was a decision. And the decision served the institution, not the patient.

The SIDS classification illustrates the same mechanism in a different register. When an infant dies suddenly and the autopsy finds nothing conclusive, the death is classified as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—a name that means, in plain language, “the baby died and we do not know why.” SIDS is listed in the International Classification of Diseases as a recognised disorder. It has a code. It can be studied, counted, and funded. What it cannot do is point toward the DPT vaccination that, in 85 per cent of cases, was administered within the preceding two to four months. As Trebing documents, the classification functions as what he calls “a garbage diagnosis”—a name that absorbs the unexplained and prevents the obvious question from being asked.

Ralph Scobey, MD, described the same structural prevention in his 1952 testimony to the US House of Representatives. “For almost half a century,” he told Congress, “poliomyelitis investigations have been directed towards a supposed exogenous virus. The manner in which the Public Health Law is now stated imposes only this type of investigation. No intensive studies have been made to determine whether or not the so-called virus of poliomyelitis simply results from an exogenous factor, for example, a food poison.” The law imposed the name. The name imposed the investigation. The investigation confirmed the name. The food poisons went unexamined.

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All of this rests on a financial structure.

The WHO describes the ICD as “the diagnostic classification standard for all clinical and research purposes.” It is cited in over 20,000 scientific articles and used by more than 100 countries. The WHO’s own information sheet states that “the ICD defines the universe of diseases.” That word—defines—is not neutral. The ICD does not record diseases. It creates the categories within which diseases can exist as billable, researchable, treatable entities. What the ICD does not define does not exist within the financial architecture of medicine. What it does define becomes real.

This means the system must name. At every encounter, in every consultation, the physician must produce a diagnosis. Not because the patient’s health requires it, but because the system’s solvency requires it. A doctor who tells a patient “your body appears to be detoxifying—rest, drink water, eat well, and let this pass” has provided sound advice and generated no revenue. A doctor who diagnoses “acute viral nasopharyngitis” and prescribes a decongestant has produced a billable event. The financial incentive always points toward naming, never away from it.

The physician was trained for this. Medical education, as immunologist Suzanne Humphries observed, produces “highly trained technicians for the pharmaceutical industry.” Joel Lexchin, MD, describes how drug companies make contact with medical students “when they are at an impressionable time in their professional life,” building relationships with faculty that enable them to “mold students into the types of doctors the industry wants them to be.” The doctor who names quickly and prescribes confidently is the doctor the system was designed to produce. The doctor who investigates slowly and prescribes reluctantly is an inefficiency.

A patient presents with fatigue, joint pain, brain fog, and intermittent digestive problems. These symptoms, taken together, describe a body under sustained stress—possibly from accumulated toxic exposure, possibly from nutritional depletion, possibly from chronic emotional strain. But “accumulated toxic exposure” is not an ICD code. The physician must select from available categories. The patient receives “fibromyalgia,” or “chronic fatigue syndrome,” or “irritable bowel syndrome”—or all three simultaneously, each generating a separate billing pathway, a separate specialist referral, a separate pharmaceutical intervention. A single condition of generalised bodily distress has been fragmented into three reimbursable products. The naming system did not clarify the patient’s problem. It multiplied it—and each fragment became a revenue stream.

This structural compulsion explains the expansion from ICD-9’s approximately 13,000 codes to ICD-10’s 70,000. The five-fold multiplication did not reflect a five-fold increase in human disease. It reflected a five-fold increase in billing granularity. The system needed more names because more names meant more revenue pathways.

Lester and Parker state the implication that the system cannot acknowledge: if the medical establishment had correctly identified the causes of disease and was treating each one with the appropriate medicine, the incidence of disease would be in rapid decline and people everywhere would experience improving health. The opposite is occurring. Disease incidence is rising. Health is deteriorating. The system responds by creating more names. By 2020, the pharmaceutical industry’s revenue had reached US$1,228 billion. Pfizer alone reported US$81.3 billion for 2021, a 92 per cent increase, the majority from a product whose diagnostic code had been created the previous year.

The code did not follow reality. Reality was shaped to fit the code.

The regulatory structure ensures this arrangement continues. The FDA receives 45 per cent of its annual budget from pharmaceutical companies—the same companies it is charged with regulating. Nine of the previous ten FDA commissioners joined pharmaceutical companies after leaving the agency. More than two-thirds of Congress took money from the pharmaceutical industry in 2020. The CDC owns 56 vaccine patents, buys and distributes $4.6 billion in vaccines annually, and receives direct industry funding through the CDC Foundation. The system that names, the system that approves the drugs matched to the names, and the system that mandates the interventions attached to those drugs are all funded by the same source. The naming system is not merely compatible with this financial architecture. It is the load-bearing wall.

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A system that employs millions of intelligent, often well-intentioned people, consuming trillions of dollars, producing seventy thousand diagnostic categories, presides over a population that grows sicker every year. This makes sense once you recognise that the system is not designed to investigate illness. It is designed to process it. Each name is a billing category, a research silo, a pharmaceutical market segment, a specialist referral pathway, and a psychological anchor. The names serve the system. The system does not need to understand disease. It needs to classify it—and permanent classifications generate recurring revenue.

The research loop reinforces this. A researcher funded to study “rheumatoid arthritis” is not funded to ask whether those symptoms might represent the body’s response to accumulated environmental toxins. The funding, the methodology, and the journals that publish the results all assume the disease exists as a discrete entity. The ICD code remains intact. The drug developed to treat the code becomes another product. Nobody steps outside the loop to ask whether the definitions correspond to reality—because pharmaceutical companies, as Lester and Parker observe, have a vested interest in research that results in marketable products, not in genuine investigation into the nature and causes of disease.

The word “conspiracy” implies secret coordination. This is something different—an architecture that operates in plain sight. The billing system requires names. The pharmaceutical industry requires conditions. The insurance industry requires codes. The research establishment requires defined entities. The specialist hierarchy requires discrete categories. None of this is hidden. (I have written elsewhere about the Five Walls that protect this architecture—the structural barriers that prevent reform from within. The naming system is the foundation on which all five rest.)

Remove the name and you remove the product. Ask “why is this person sick?” instead of “what does this person have?” and the architecture becomes unnecessary. The four causes do not need 70,000 names. They need investigation—the kind that the naming system was designed to prevent.

Williams wrote that “fear and disease-consciousness, ‘examination’ engendered, are among the worst causes of disease.” The naming system manufactures both. It produces fear through prognosis and disease-consciousness through identity. It takes a person experiencing symptoms—symptoms that may be temporary, may be the body’s own corrective response, may resolve entirely with changes to environment, nutrition, or circumstance—and converts that person into a patient with a condition. The condition has a code. The code has a protocol. The protocol has a price. The price is paid. The cause remains uninvestigated.

The man diagnosed with metastatic oesophageal cancer received a name. The name carried a prognosis. The prognosis killed him. The autopsy found nothing to justify the death. The system that named him moved on to the next patient, and named them too.

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References

Allen (reader comment), comment on “Four Causes, Seventy Thousand Diseases,” Unbekoming Substack.

Bailey, Mark, The Final Pandemic: An Antidote to Medical Tyranny, 2023.

Banks, Nancy Turner, MD, AIDS, Opium, Diamonds, and Empire: The Deadly Virus of International Greed, 2010.

Duesberg, Peter, PhD, as cited in Mark Gober, An End to Upside Down Medicine, Waterside, 2023.

Gober, Mark, An End to Upside Down Medicine: Contagion, Viruses, and Vaccines, Waterside, 2023.

Humphries, Suzanne, MD, as cited in Mark Gober, An End to Upside Down Medicine, Waterside, 2023.

Lester, Dawn, and Parker, David, What Really Makes You Ill? Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease Is Wrong, 2019.

Lexchin, Joel, MD, MS, as cited in Mark Gober, An End to Upside Down Medicine, Waterside, 2023.

McBean, Eleanor, The Poisoned Needle, 1957.

Nightingale, Florence, Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not, 1860.

Roytas, Daniel, Can You Catch a Cold? Untold History and Human Experiments, 2024.

Scobey, Ralph, MD, “The Poison Cause of Poliomyelitis and Obstructions to Its Investigation,” statement to the US House of Representatives, Archives of Pediatrics, April 1952.

Shaw, George Bernard, as cited in Eleanor McBean, The Poisoned Needle, 1957; also in Lester and Parker, What Really Makes You Ill?, 2019.

Terrain Therapy: How To Achieve Perfect Health Through Diet, Living Habits & Divine Thinking, from the wisdom of Dr. Ulric Williams, with foreword by Dr. Samantha Bailey, 2022.

Trebing, William P., Good-Bye Germ Theory, Xlibris, 2006.

World Health Organization, International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/

World Health Organization, “Noncommunicable diseases” fact sheet, June 2018.

World Health Organization, COVID-19 case definition, August 7, 2020.

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