What do you think is a non-disease?

摘要

EDITOR-The BMJ's decision to extend participatory democracy to the question of disease is important not so much for the results but because it happened at all.To a previous generation the idea of asking consumers to decide on these matters would have been incomprehensible. Doctors decided which conditions were legitimate and which should be consigned to the outer darkness. In the debate about the nature of neurasthenia at the end of the 19th century all protagonists were in the medical profession and their debates were published in journals. The views of a few well educated and well heeled patients may be inferred from diaries and fiction, but their voices were largely unheard and unheeded.