different between pathology vs pathologize

English

Etymology

From French pathologie, from Ancient Greek ????? (páthos, “disease”) and -????? (-logía, “study of”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /p????l?d?i/
• Rhymes: -?l?d?i

Noun

pathology (usually uncountable, plural pathologies)

1. (medicine) The branch of medicine concerned with the study of the nature of disease and its causes, processes, development, and consequences.
2. (clinical medicine) The medical specialty that provides microscopy and other laboratory services (e.g., cytology, histology) to clinicians.

3. Pathosis: any deviation from a healthy or normal structure or function; abnormality; illness or malformation.

   Synonyms: abnormality, disease, illness, pathosis

Usage notes

Some house style guides for medical publications avoid the "illness" sense of pathology (“disease, state of ill health”) and replace it with pathosis. The rationale is that the -ology form should be reserved for the "study of disease" sense and for the medical specialty that provides microscopy and other laboratory services (e.g., cytology, histology) to clinicians. This rationale drives similar usage preferences about etiology ("cause" sense versus "study of causes" sense), methodology ("methods" sense versus "study of methods" sense), and other -ology words.

Not all such natural usage can be purged gracefully, but the goal is to reserve the -ology form to its "study" sense when practical. Not all publications bother with this prescription, because most physicians don't do so in their own speech (and the context makes clear the sense intended).

Another limitation is that pathology (“illness”) has an adjectival form (pathologic), but the corresponding adjectival form of pathosis (pathotic) is idiomatically missing from English (defective declension), so pathologic is obligate for both senses ("diseased" and "related to the study of disease"); this likely helps keep the "illness" sense of pathology in natural use (as the readily retrieved noun counterpart to pathologic in the "diseased" sense).

Derived terms

Related terms

• pathologic
• pathological
• pathobiology
• pathophysiology

Translations

Further reading

• pathology on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Anagrams

• logopathy

English

Alternative forms

• pathologise

Etymology

pathology +? -ize

Verb

pathologize (third-person singular simple present pathologizes, present participle pathologizing, simple past and past participle pathologized)

1. (transitive) To characterize as a pathology or disease; to characterize (a person) as suffering from a disease.

   Some childhood behavior has been pathologized as attention-deficit disorder.

   • 2001 Dec. 16, Melanie Thernstrom, "Pain, the Disease," New York Times (retrieved 12 July 2011):

     Many pain patients have had doctors who pathologized them, told them their pain was unreal.

   • 2007 July 23, Rachel Endo, "Inbox," Time:

     To pathologize China's industries as corrupt not only reeks of centuries-old Yellow Peril rhetoric but also fails to acknowledge the shortcomings of transnational regulations.

   • 2009, Joseph G. Ponterotto et al., Handbook of Multicultural Counseling, ?ISBN, p. 142:

     My automatic reaction was to deal with the anxiety he evoked in me by pathologizing him as paranoid and obsessive compulsive.

Translations