Thinking straight about disease
It is not really correct to say that someone “has” or “got” covd, influenza, a cold, pneumonia, diabetes, measles, chicken pox, bronchitis, or any other of the multiplicity of “diseases”, which people are taught to fear. What they actually have are “symptoms”: temperature, coughing, sneezing, shivers, headache, growths, eruptions etc. - these are real phenomena which everyone has observed and/or experienced, but “influenza”, “a cold”, “measles” etc are just abstractions. Where are they? Has anyone ever seen, heard, felt or experienced any of them, apart from through their “symptoms”? At the most, these words can be used to give an idea of what range of phenomena an individual is experiencing. But the step from that to giving “diseases” a concrete ontological existence of their own and moreover attributing to them an active and malevolent nature (which, if you think about it, is how most people are brought up to see them) is enormous and indefensible. It is a transgression of a fundamen...