why are diseases always negative? Are there diseases that have positive effects on human beings?
In: Biology
I took a fun class called Mind and Medicine, and that’s one of the key points they talked about. A disease is considered so because of the effects that either put people in pain or restrict them from the environment that statistically ‘normal’ people can navigate with ease. In the case of pain, disease is easy to pin down. A patient hurts and tells us so. But in cases of say, physical disability or mental illness, there are a lot of societal factors at play. If every building we built were designed around wheelchair travel or crutches then maybe a disease of the legs wouldn’t be a disease. If ‘normal’ people are not expected to fulfill certain social roles, then maybe moderate depression wouldn’t be categorized. I’m not saying, by the way, that mental and physical disease are not real or valid, just that there are medical, societal, and environmental factors that determine what is and is not a disease.
As a silly example, let’s say that one percent of humans could fly. Would the 99 percent be considered diseased? Or would the one percent. If half the population could fly, it might just be considered a natural distribution like eye color. If all but one percent of humans could fly, the ones that couldn’t would likely be considered diseased. If only 0.01 percent of humans couldn’t , they’d be very likely to be considered diseased. The ‘disease’ in question could shift from one to the other depending on what is seen as normal
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