Open Thread, October 20 - 26, 2013

Adele Lopez

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

From your post I would taboo "medical", "medicalization", "normal" and "big pharma"

Sure.

The trend to consider certain conditions and psychological states "diseases" or "illnesses" (which implies biological causality) is bad because:

It narrows the range of what's considered acceptable human variation. Consider e.g. a grumpy guy. Would it be good if he were to be diagnosed with the illness of grumpiness (with associated social costs) and prescribed a pill for that?
It assumes biological causality for what are not necessarily problems of human biology (or biochemistry).
There are considerable forces in the business world which would stand to gain huge amounts of money were this to happen. This is not an outright argument against per se, but it does make one suspicious.

The trend to consider certain conditions and psychological states "diseases" or "illnesses" (which implies biological causality) is bad because:

This is why I thought that tabooing "associated words" would be a good thing. Many treatable conditions in medicine are not considered "diseases" or "illnesses" anymore, and they shouldn't be. This especially applies to psychiatry. Many diagnoses cannot be made unless the condition "causes significant harm to the patient" is met.

I would go even further ... (read more)

5TheOtherDave13y

Well, among other things, it depends on what the pill does. If it doesn't make him less grumpy, for example, then I can't see any benefit at all. If it makes him less grumpy but also does a bunch of other stuff that leaves him worse off, then there's no net benefit. Etc. All that aside, if being prescribed a pill that makes me less grumpy inevitably subjects me to social attack, I would say that being able to be less grumpy is a good thing, and the social attacks are bad things, and the net value of being prescribed the pill depends on the ratio of costs to benefits. And in both cases, I would strongly endorse a social shift that stops attacking me for being prescribed such a pill, rather than blame the pill for the social attacks. There's all kinds of things I can do that subject me to social attacks; blaming me for doing them on that basis is suboptimal. [...] Here again, it depends on what the pill does. If I start with a false theory of the causes of the problem, I'm unlikely to come up with a pill that actually solves the problem in an acceptably targetted way; by the same token, if the pill actually does make me less grumpy without too many side-effects, that's a pretty good sign that there's a biological (or biochemical) cause for grumpiness. Incidentally, I would say all the same things about being prescribed a pill that makes me less cancerous.