A disease is a physical abnormality evident macroscopically (lump on the head visible to the naked eye) , microscopically (cancer cells on a ‘Pap’ smear) or by chemical assay (high blood sugar in diabetes). If there is no such objective abnormality, the individual is normal, disease-free.
IOW, if we can't detect it with our present tests, it doesn't exist. Therefore, diabetes did not exist before our ability to detect it with chemical assay, cancer did not exist before tests were developed for it, etc.
New diseases are found all the time. Few are really new, we have just developed a method to determine when they are present.
You didn’t understand his point.
What he’s saying is that psychiatrists are calling these “diseases” and referring to them as having physical causes, but as of the current state of research, there is no such basis in fact. Many psychiatrists refer to ADHD as a chemical imbalance in the brain, but there is no study to date where psychiatry or neurology can take any brain chemistry and simply from objective testing, determine the degree of ADHD like you can with diabetes.
That’s all he’s saying.
ADHD, for example, as with bipolar, schizophrena and so on, are “determined” by behavior observed and interpreted by others, not by a physical test.
Hence, they are not “physical” diseases. They are behavioral issues, usually in the eye of the beholders.
“IOW, if we can’t detect it with our present tests, it doesn’t exist”
Yep, so, wonder if they were saying the same thing before microscopes were invented.
You hit the nail on the head.