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Ethics |
Richard Smith
BMJ, BMA House, London WC1H 9JR
The BMJ recently ran a vote on bmj.com to identify the "top 10 non-diseases."1 Some critics thought it an absurd exercise,2 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.
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In 1979 the BMJ published a study that did something similar.3
Non-medical academics, medical academics, general practitioners, and
secondary school students were invited to say whether 38 terms did or
did not refer to a disease. Almost 100% thought that malaria and
tuberculosis were diseases, but less than 20% thought the following
to be diseases: lead poisoning, carbon monoxide poisoning, senility,
hangover, fractured skull, heatstroke, tennis elbow, colour
blindness, malnutrition, barbiturate overdose, drowning, or
starvation (figure). People were split 50:50 over whether hypertension,
acne vulgaris, or gall stones were diseases. The doctors were
more likely to view the terms as referring to diseases. The authors
of this study included Guy Scadding, who spent much of his life
spelling out to doctors that no general agreement exists on how to
define a disease.
| Summary points
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Fourteen years earlier, the New England Journal of Medicine had
published a paper arguing the case for "non-diseases."4
Better, argued Clifton Meador, to describe a patient in whom a
diagnosis could not be made as having a "non-disease" rather than
make "the common error of continuing to label such patients with
non-existent diseases." He produced a classification of non-disease
and concluded that "the treatment for non-disease is never the
treatment indicated for the corresponding disease entity. In this
statement lies the ultimate value of the science of non-disease."
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What is a disease? |
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 Top  What is a
disease?  The pluses and
minuses... The BMJ
's vote References
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Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) thought that diseases could be classified just like plant and animal species. In other words, diseases have an existence independent of the observer and exist in nature, ready to be "discovered." In complete contrast, others see the notion of disease as essentially a means of social control.5 Doctors define a patient's condition as a "disease" and are then licensed to take various actions, including perhaps incarceration. "Each civilisation," wrote Ivan Illich, "defines its own diseases. What is sickness in one might be chromosomal abnormality, crime, holiness, or sin in another."6
The Oxford Textbook of Medicine wisely stays away from defining a
disease. The Chambers Dictionary defines disease as "an
unhealthy state of body or mind; a disorder, illness or ailment with
distinctive symptoms, caused eg by infection." Neither definition is
operationally helpful, especially as health is even harder to define
than disease. Imre Loeffler, surgeon, essayist, and wit, says that
the World Health Organization's famous definition of health as
"complete physical, psychological, and social wellbeing" is achieved
only at the point of simultaneous orgasm, leaving most of us
unhealthy (and so, by the Chambers Dictionary definition,
diseased) most of the time.
"There is no disease that you either have or
don't have except
perhaps sudden death and rabies. All other diseases you either have a little
or a lot of."
Geoffrey Rose epidemiologist |
Disease is often defined as a departure from "normal," and helpfully David
Sackett and others offer six definitions of normal in Clinical
Epidemiology, "the bible of evidence based medicine"(table
1).7 One common definition is
that you lie more than two standard deviations from the mean on
whatever measure is usedheight,
weight, haemoglobin concentration, and tens of thousands of others.
By definition, 5% of people are thus "abnormal" (and we might say
diseased) on each test. Run enough tests and we are all abnormal
(diseased). Or, on a definition of increased risk, we might define
almost the entire population of Britain as diseased if we consider
all those with a blood cholesterol concentration that carries
an extra risk of mortality compared with the cholesterol concentration
of those living in less developed communities.
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The pluses and minuses of having a disease label |
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Top What is a
disease? The pluses
and minuses... The BMJ
's vote References
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To have your condition labelled as a disease may bring considerable benefit.
Immediately you are likely to enjoy sympathy rather than blame. You
may be exempted from many commitments, including work. Children learn
very young that saying you have a headache will bring sympathy and a
hug, whereas saying, "I can't be bothered to go to school" will bring
anger and punishment. Having a disease may also entitle you to
benefits such as sick pay, free prescriptions, insurance payments,
and access to facilities denied to healthy people. You may also feel
that you have an explanation for your suffering.
| "I don't know why you say that making a
diagnosis is the most important thing a doctor does. As a general
practitioner I hardly ever make a diagnosis."
General practitioner north London |
But the diagnosis of a disease may also create many problems. It may allow the authorities to lock you up or invade your body. You may be denied insurance, a mortgage, and employment. You are forever labelled. You are a victim. You are not just a person but an asthmatic, a schizophrenic, a leper, an epileptic. Some diseases carry an inescapable stigma, which may create many more problems than the condition itself. Worst of all, the diagnosis of a disease may lead you to regard yourself as forever flawed and incapable of "rising above" your problem.
Consider the case of alcoholism, a hotly disputed diagnosis. Better perhaps to be "an alcoholic" than a morally reprehensible drunk. But is it helpful to think of yourself as "powerless over alcohol," with your problem explained by faults in your genes or body chemistry? It may lead you to a learned and licensed helplessness.
Illich puts it like this this6:
"In a morbid society the belief prevails that defined and diagnosed ill-health is infinitely preferable to any other form of negative label or to no label at all. It is better than criminal or political deviance, better than laziness, better than self-chosen absence from work. More and more people subconsciously know that they are sick and tired of their jobs and of their leisure passivities, but they want to hear the lie that physical illness relieves them of social and political responsibilities. They want their doctor to act as lawyer and priest. As a lawyer, the doctor exempts the patient from his normal duties and enables him to cash in on the insurance fund he was forced to build. As a priest, he becomes the patient's accomplice in creating the myth that he is an innocent victim of biological mechanisms rather than lazy, greedy, or envious deserter of a social struggle over the tools of production. Social life becomes a giving and receiving of therapy: medical, psychiatric, pedagogic, or geriatric. Claiming access to treatment becomes a political duty, and medical certification a powerful device for social control."
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The BMJ 's vote |
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Top What is a
disease? The pluses and
minuses... The BMJ
's vote References
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We began our search for non-diseases by generating our own definition and list. By "non-disease" we meant "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." This exercise prompted an internal debate about whether we were insulting those who might regard themselves as having what others might classify as a non-disease.
We responded by making clear that we were 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. Consider the suffering that might come from grief, loneliness, or redundancy.
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| Top 20 non-diseases
(voted on bmj.com by readers), in descending order of "non-diseaseness"
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Having generated our own list, we then invited suggestions from our editorial board. We were surprised that we quickly achieved a list of nearly 100. Next, readers were invited to add to the list, boosting it to nearly 200.
Paul Glasziou, a general practitioner from Queensland, Australia, and a
member of the BMJ editorial board, has used most of these to
produce an ICNDan
international classification of non-diseases (table 2).
Deliberately, but perhaps unwisely, we allowed almost anything to be
added to the list, including some "non-treatments" like circumcision.
A list of non-treatments might be even longer than a list of
non-diseases. Then came the vote for the top 10 non-diseases, and the
box shows the top 20.
The complete list is interesting, and I was surprised that we could generate so many non-diseases. Some of these non-diseases already appear in official classifications of disease, and perhaps those that do not currently appear will be appearing soon. Disease classifications are likely to grow not shrink, particularly as genetics begins to allow the separation of what are currently single diseases into many.
What mattered most about this process, however, was not the list but the
debate. Rapid responses to the debate are summarised on p 913.
Surely, everything is to be gained and nothing lost by raising
consciousness about the slipperiness of the concept of
disease.
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Footnotes |
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Competing interests: None declared.
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References |
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Top What is a
disease? The pluses and
minuses... The BMJ
's vote References
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| 1. | http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/324/7334/DC1 |
| 2. | Bailey M. How to use an esteemed medical journal to increase suffering. http://bmj.com/cgi/eletters/324/7334/DC1 |
| 3. | Campbell EJM, Scadding JG, Roberts RS. The concept of
disease. BMJ 1979; ii: 757-762 |
| 4. | Meador CK. The art and science of nondisease. N Engl J
Med 1965; 272: 92-95 |
| 5. | Foucault M. The birth of the clinic. New York: Pantheon, 1973. |
| 6. | Illich I. Limits to medicine. London: Marion Boyars, 1976. |
| 7. | Sackett DL, Haynes RB, Guyatt GH, Tigwell P. Clinical epidemiology: a basic science for clinical medicine. Boston: Little, Brown: 1991:59. |
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