I often hear patients speak of vertigo as if it were some brilliant diagnosis made by a genius emergency room doctor. Just because it’s a foreign word, that doesn’t make it any more clever than if they’d been told they were dizzy.

In my native Sweden, there seems to be a domestic lay word for almost every disease.

The runner-up prize in my book goes to Fonstertittarsjukan, ‘The Window Shoppers Disease’, which we call intermittent claudication, usually caused by poor blood flow to the legs (people feel better if they stand still for a while; for example, pretending to look in a store window) but occasionally we get tricked and the symptom can be caused by pressure on the spinal cord from disc disease.

I absolutely love the No.1 word on my Swedish Disease Names list: The word they use for the most common cause of true vertigo, ‘benign positional vertigo’ or BPV. The Swedish word is Kristallsjukan (the Crystal Disease).