When is something a disease vs a medical condition? I find out in about 30 seconds that don't know anything about medical concepts. Disease is a general term, and that would make COVID-19 a disease. Here's a definition:
human disease, an impairment of the normal state of a human being that interrupts or modifies its vital functions.
Maybe I am looking for distinctions such as the types of disease. I find an article that outlines four main types: infectious diseases, deficiency diseases, hereditary diseases (including both genetic diseases and non-genetic hereditary diseases), and physiological diseases.
So that is pretty extensive. Maybe the question might be this: what is a non-disease? I always find that someone has asked this before me. The British Medical Journal asked this question.
"On 13 April we published a theme issue on the medicalisation of human experience ("Too much medicine?"), which included an article on non-diseases.
By "non-disease" we mean "a human process or problem that some have defined as a medical condition but where people may have better outcomes if the problem or process was not defined in that way."
We are not suggesting that the suffering of people with these "non-diseases" is not genuine. The suffering of many with "non-diseases" may be much greater than those with widely recognised diseases. Disease is a very slippery concept.
After asking readers to suggest non-diseases, we invited them to vote for the 10 conditions that best fitted our definition."
Here are the results of that ballot, in which 570 people voted.
Condition: ageing Work Boredom Bags under eyes Ignorance balkness Freckles Big ears... and so on as the list is long
They acknowledge that some critics thought it an absurd exercise, but our primary aim was to illustrate the slipperiness of the notion of disease. We wanted to prompt a debate on what is and what is not a disease and draw attention to the increasing tendency to classify people's problems as diseases.
This works for me. Medical people voting on what is a non-disease. Let's conclude with this joke, or sort of joke:
A woman walks into a doctor’s office and sits down in the waiting room. Whem it’s her turn to talk to the doctor, she describes all of her symptoms, and they’re unlike anything he’s heard before. The doctor runs a number of tests. When she returns for the results, he says, ‘Well I have good news and bad news.’ The woman replies, ‘I’ll hear the good news first please.’ The doctor replies ‘The good news is we’re naming a disease after you.
On to the absurd: I found this happy birthday greeting I made - this is the St. Augustine alligator pond at the zoological park. An alligator can jump six feet into the air. That looks close to six feet to me.
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