Trademarking Awareness for a Birth Defect? No, I am not Joking…

When I was a medic in the Army, I received a memo regarding the fact we were to no longer permitted to refer to the Heimlich Maneuver as such and, instead, we were to refer to the technique as “abdominal thrusts”. When I inquired as to why, I was told that the good doctor was trying to collect royalties on the use of his name. To be fair and honest, I have no idea if this is true or not.

Kudos to Cory Doctorow for bringing something similar but true to my attention. It seems that there is a rare condition known as Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia, apparently a serious condition. Ready for this? Seems some brilliant organization is attempting to trademark the term “Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Awareness” in other words;

“If successful, their trademark would prevent other CDH support and research organizations from using the term Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Awareness in their literature and in their fundraising efforts.”

Please, all of you, do something I already did. Go digitally sign this petition against this stupidity. Medical terms are NOT trademarks. They are descriptions. Just because you add the word awareness to it does not make it yours. Claiming so only makes you arrogant, selfish and stupid.

Now forgive me, I am off to trademark the terms “for the better good”, “in our best interest” and “please support our cause”.

— UPDATE —

Comments for this post are closed due to a certain person repeatedly posting comments under different e-mail addresses which all seem bogus. Either that or several people had the several identical paragraphs of words just by chance. To be fair, am just closing them. However one commenter states that it is not a disease but a birth defect and that it is not rare. That is seemingly correct so I state at least that.