The breakdown of the Soviet Union and the subsequent De-Sovietization, Globalization and Westernization of the society caused major linguistic changes in the Russian language. Although these were originally welcome, they soon were perceived as a problem to be solved with language regulation in the name of a nation-building policy. Based on the theory of metaphor scenarios the paper selects a series of health and illness metaphors for language change found in texts from print media metadiscourse. Their use shows that language change is conceptualised negatively, as a threat to the health of the language and that linguistic regulation is a way to guard language against such a threat.