For example, when a patient seeks medical help because of a severe flu, the doctor will not care about the specific virological and immunological process behind the clearly visible suffering.
This is contrasted by many hemochromatosis patients who will neither see suffering nor a change in their life quality, while the disease-causing process is severe and often deadly if left untreated.
[2][3][4][5] Though manuals like the DSM have covered a lot of ground when it comes to defining mental illnesses, in some disorders the reliability of diagnosis is still very poor.
As Richard Green pointed out in a review on pedophilia, psychiatry should identify unhealthy mental processes and treat them, and not focus on cultural norms, moral questions or legal issues.
[7] As textbooks and handbooks like DSM are usually written by Western authors, a culturally neutral definition of mental diseases is an unsolved problem.
[8] A patient with a paralysis is referred to an oncologist if the condition is caused by a cancer metastasis in the spinal cord; a treatment by a neurologist is a secondary consideration.
Idiopathic is a descriptive term used in medicine to denote diseases with an unknown cause or mechanism of apparent spontaneous origin.