I’m not offering up a new definition of disease! I’m doing precisely the opposite.
Look, maybe you’re a perfect rational thinker already, but most people aren’t like that. They do conflate a bunch of different questions into the “disease” label.
If you impose a single fixed definition on everyone, and make sure they are all talking about the same thing… well, if it works, I don’t actually know what would happen, but it won’t work. You’ll just be arguing about the definition of disease all day.
The important point to make is that the people asking “is obesity a disease” don’t actually want to know that. They want to answer some other question. It’s simply irrelevant, most of the time, whether or not obesity satisfies the medical definition of disease, to do this.
So why waste time establishing that your official definition of the disease is better than someone else’s intuitive one? This just seems like an effort to try and frame the debate, so that people will address the real question “in light of your answer”.
I’m not offering up a new definition of disease! I’m doing precisely the opposite.
Look, maybe you’re a perfect rational thinker already, but most people aren’t like that. They do conflate a bunch of different questions into the “disease” label.
If you impose a single fixed definition on everyone, and make sure they are all talking about the same thing… well, if it works, I don’t actually know what would happen, but it won’t work. You’ll just be arguing about the definition of disease all day.
The important point to make is that the people asking “is obesity a disease” don’t actually want to know that. They want to answer some other question. It’s simply irrelevant, most of the time, whether or not obesity satisfies the medical definition of disease, to do this.
So why waste time establishing that your official definition of the disease is better than someone else’s intuitive one? This just seems like an effort to try and frame the debate, so that people will address the real question “in light of your answer”.