Doc Joe wants people to know that "regime" is not the appropriate word to describe a list of medications that a patient is taking pursuant to a doctor's prescription. "Regimen" is the term he demands, with very arrogantly presumed authority (regency?).
I did a quick study, because I've used "regime" myself, I'm not the only one, and I think I'm as educated as, or perhaps quite a bit more so than Doc Joe, when it comes to English language and rhetoric. Words are primary tools for me as a lawyer, even as drugs are primary tools for Joe as a (very political) psychiatrist.
Joe maintains that regimen, regiment and regime "...are different words with different meanings." Well sure, but many words are different from each other or related in different ways, for different purposes, and to different extents. The Doc might know this, but his native language (psychiatrese) could cause the principle to be very difficult for him to apply in English.
Just a few examples are instructive.
Cat (the feline mammal and common house pet) and cat (the large earth mover manufactured by Caterpillar Tractor Company) are "different" words which sound and are spelled exactly alike; the same can be said of benefits (plural noun) and benefits (present tense of the verb), although these two "different" words are close forms with related meanings, unlike cat and cat; spring (the astronomical, meteorological or calendar season) and spring (a device which expands and contracts with increasing resistance or a sudden motion considered to be characteristic of such a device), or rose (the flower) and rose (past tense of the verb to rise) are further examples of pairs of words that are clearly different yet spelled and pronounced identically.
Yawl and y'all, shoe and shoo!, red and read, sew and so, and a long list of homophones, are words which sound exactly alike, but may be spelled differently and completely disrelated for meaning.
Individual small, common words may have similarities or differences that are purely a function of grammar (rules and habits of use), but they are not close at all in pronunciation or spelling. E.g., pronouns like me and I, she and her
Machine, machinery, machination, mechanical, mechanism, and machismo are words that have similarities in meaning, spelling and pronunciation, as well as common derivation, but they remain different words, very much like regimen, regiment and regime.
I took one semester of linguistics at Northwestern University, as well as German (I was briefly almost fluent) and Russian (a beautifully complex language). The subject of words is amazing and probably as complicated as the human mind itself. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God," as (I think) the Bible says.
Which brings me back to Joe Pierre's "different words" regimen, regiment and regime, three words which are closely related and commonly derived from the Latin regere (to rule). Regimen and regime have incidentally been almost interchangeable in historical usage. So what exactly is Doc Joe's point?
The San Francisco psychiatrist doth protest too much, methinks. It's emotionally difficult for him to hear or read psychiatric practices or treatments being called regimes. That word may recall or just come too close to, e.g., despotic governments like Saddam Hussain's Iraq, Putin's (or Stalin's) Russia, Hitler's Nazi Germany, and Jefferson Davis' Confederate States of America. Thus for Joe, regimen is much preferred, as long as you don't err by adding a "t" to the end of that word, giving it a military connotation.
In fact, psychiatry is a despotic regime. It is perhaps the most despotic regime in human history. The so-called "treatments" which guys like Joe Pierre militaristically order are horrendously damaging, and they are forced on thousands of people against their will everyday, people who have never been convicted of any crime, people kept, exploited and abused as psychiatric slaves!
I've spent twenty years fighting this despotic regime, at Elgin Mental Health Center, in cruelly regimented "clinical" units, behind locked security doors guarded by uniformed thugs and despotic "administrators" who hear, see and speak no evil until they are sued for millions of dollars in damages.
Too bad Joe, if you don't like my words for your f***ing psych regimen. Go look the words up in a dictionary, man. They all work!
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