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Comment by MichaelCollins | Hacker News Reader

Good example of this from the article: "alcohol use disorder (formerly called alcoholism)"

That’s just a straightforward description of changes in the DSM. “Alcoholism” was split into “alcohol abuse” and “alcohol dependence” back in the 80’s, but in the intervening years the consensus view settled on treating these as separate symptoms of a single disorder. This is reflected in the DSM-5, which uses the term “alcohol use disorder”. The purpose of the linked article is to ensure practitioners are using consistent terms when communicating in a professional context.

Further context: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2701140/

pedantically, I find alcohol use disorder more accurate to my internal definition of condition and disease.

What we call things matter: as even slight changes in wording affect how people perceive things - so great care should be use when deciding what vernacular we should adopt generally.

In my mind, an alcoholic is someone that has a dependency on alcohol, but not all people with AUD have a dependency on alcohol. For example, I think binge-drinking consistently (college students on weekends, for example) can be considered to have a mild AUD, but that person is not necessarily an "alcoholic" -- at least not what the average person considers to be an an alcoholic.

(If anyone knows more, feel free to correct me)

It makes sense to have a distinction between the word disease and condition and a disorder.

A disease particular is from a foreign agent: bactierial/fungal/viral/prionic/parasitic.

a condition or disorder is an integral structure on awry, or rewritten (by chemicals or by viewing data) to go awry: the key distinction between this and disease being that there is no other 'lifeform' (yes - include viruses for simplicity's sake).

so alcohol use disorder vs alcoholism reflects a more accurate state of reality. (there is no bacteria/fungus/prion/parasite/virus that is the CAUSE of alcoholism - a chemical rewrote your brain which has been damaged to potentially require alcohol to survive).

the push back I've encountered had nothing to do with being 'correct'/'sensible' and had everything to do with protecting the feelings of people suffering from AUD - which is not a worthwhile goal to coddle people with fluffy medical terms in the aims of removing responsibility from one's self...

... sorry for the rant :)

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