What's In A Word?

I was just reviewing some of my old writings and questioning my use of the word illness. Perhaps instead of the word illness when writing I should use the word disease.

The thoughts and feelings I felt by my own use of the word illness caused me to look up the words illness and disease.

The definition for illness is:
wickedness, unpleasantness, an unhealthy condition of the body or mind.
The definition for disease is:
a condition of the living animal or plant body or one of its parts that impairs normal functioning and is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms.

Think about this, if we say that we are ill, we are in a sense saying that we are wicked and unpleasant, that our body and mind are in an unhealthy condition. We may feel unhealthy and unpleasant, but we don't want to label ourselves in that way and form ourselves around that thought do we? How did having a physical symptom of some kind become related to being wicked?

When we use the word illness we refer to ourselves as being ill, but when we use the word disease we do not refer to ourselves as the disease do we? How interesting is that.

The word illness seems to focus on our actual body as somehow flawed.
The word disease seems to focus more on the function of our body being impaired.

What if what we experience in our body is not illness/wickedness, but instead disease/impairment of function. Our body is in a state of dis-ease because for some reason our "normal" functioning has been impaired in some way.

Perhaps this can even apply to the condition of our world. Our world is feeling a lot of pain and suffering because it is in a state of dis-ease; the way it was intended to function is somehow being impaired.

What do we need to do to find our source of impairment and relieve our dis-ease bringing us back into a state of comfort,ease and normal functioning?

Could it be that we need to take a close look at the distinguishing signs and symptoms of each situation and compare them all to see where the root cause of the impairment or malfunction lies so that we can regain proper function?

Is it possible that there is a common thread running through all cases of disease with our bodies and the world, we just have to look closely enough and make comparisons to find them? What was added or is missing that is creating the impairments and malfunctions?

Isn't it interesting how just studying the use of one word can cause us to focus on so many details and form many questions? After all, it's just a word, a label that we use to describe someone or something. Does it really matter if we say illness or disease or does it matter more that we focus on finding the root cause of the condition. I wonder...