In the book “God is a Verb”, Rabbi David Cooper makes the argument that the divine supernatural existence called “God”, is best thought of not as a thing but rather as a process. The rabbi suggests that rather than thinking about what is referred to as God as being some kind of “person” who lives in clouds, it might be more accurate to contemplate it as a movement or action, flowing through everything in the cosmos, from the smallest smallest subatomic quanta to the largest galaxies.

This dynamic of naming processes, making nouns out of verbs, in essence “thing-ifying” actions is called “nominalization” and it is nowhere more evident (and reaches a particularly egregious zenith) in the realm of medicine and medicinal diagnostics.

According to Wikipedia, medical diagnosis is the “…process of determining which disease…explains a person’s symptoms and signs.” Unfortunately, that is absolutely NOT what a medical diagnosis is. Rather, medical diagnosis, the major component of the “doctor’s office visit” is nothing more than a description of a patient’s symptoms and complaints recited back to the patient in Latin. This repetition of symptomology in the language of Ancient Rome is then proclaimed a “disease” and a protocol ensues that attempts to somehow “treat” the process being described. Not cure, but “treat” because, as Dr. Andrew Weil reminds us in his book “Spontaneous Healing” when it comes to degenerative diseases, no cures are possible. And of course, he is correct. No cure is possible because no one can “cure” a description!