Re: Addiction is a disease?
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I don't understand how this makes it a disease.
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A disease is a negatively abnormal (pathologic) change in the functioning of an organism. This change can be the result of any disease process (etiology). By this definition, alcoholism clearly is a disease.
Alcoholism runs in families and thus it is likely that certain individuals have a genetic predisposition towards the disease of alcoholism. No, they will not become alcoholics unless they start drinking but the same is true for many other diseases that have genetic predispositions but require environment stimuli to develop.
To those who have said that an alcoholic's behavior is "just part of being human" and therefore alcoholism is not a disease: do you claim that there is no biological basis for human behavior? And if there is, why can't these biological mechanisms be altered in a disease state (just like any other organ system) to produce abnormal effects?
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