Should Fibromyalgia be capitalized?
Before I posted my Guide to Living with Fibromyalgia for my subscribers to read I had several friends read through it and edit it. One of those friends edited Fibromyalgia to be fibromyalgia, because technically it’s not supposed to be capitalized. So, why do I write Fibromyalgia with a capital F?
It’s simple. As far as I’m concerned Fibromyalgia is real. I don’t capitalize it (as one blogger suggests) because it has power over me, but rather because it’s real and I want it to be taken seriously. It’s just as real as Lupus or Migraines or Diabetes or any other disease or disorder that exists, so why shouldn’t it be treated the same? It’s a proper noun, a proper name therefore it should be capitalized. To me the question shouldn’t be why do we capitalize it but why don’t others do the same?
I wish I could find the post, but I can’t and for all I know the blog doesn’t exist. But, in my early days of blogging I ran across a post very similar to this. I couldn’t tell you if I was capitalizing Fibromyalgia at that time or not (you could probably go back to my very earliest posts and find out) but after reading her post saying things very similar to what I’m saying now I decided that I would take Fibromyalgia seriously and treat it just like any other disease or disorder. Why shouldn’t it be capitalized? Why should it be trivialized by not being capitalized?
I’d love to know your thoughts on this. Do you typically capitalize Fibromyalgia? Or do you avoid doing so? Do you have feeling about it one way or the other?
Elizabeth says
Little f. Neither migraine or diabetes should be capitalized. A disease, medical condition, or surgery is capitalized and considered a proper noun only if it was named for a person or place – like Ebola or Parkinson’s disease.
Donna says
You made me go and look at my blog. Turns out I don’t capitalize it. I wish I had a profound reason as to why but it’s just how I write, I’ve never really thought much about it before. I wouldn’t capitalize other illnesses either (at least consciously) so perhaps poor grammar on my part? 🙂
Julie says
Probably more like proper grammar on your part. I don’t know why certain illnesses get capitalized and certain ones don’t. I was taught that proper nouns get capitalized so to me if it’s a proper name for an illness it should get capitalized. So while you wouldn’t cap cancer, you would cap Brain Cancer (or whatever the proper name for it is). It seems there are a lot of proper names for illnesses that don’t get treated as proper nouns though, which is rather odd to me.