Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Mathematics Disorder. If you've never talked to your doctor about these conditions, it should come as little surprise; they are arguably some of the stranger diagnoses floating around in the medical literature. And although ridiculous to any sane person, many medical professionals say that these disorders are legitimate conditions that often warrant treatment.

Yet, this acceptance within the medical community has not quelled debate on the existence of many of these conditions.

"Illness is always a social construct," notes Dr. Nortin Hadler, professor of medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of the book "Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America."

"People have to agree -- both people, in general, and those in the medical community -- that a life experience should be labeled an illness," Hadler says. "For example, the Victorians medicalized orgasm, and we medicalize the lack of it."

Dr. Igor Galynker, director of The Family Center for Bipolar Disorder at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, says that some psychiatric conditions, in particular, tend to be a target of widespread controversy.

"In psychiatry, part of a disorder is clinically defined and part is societally defined," he says, adding that conditions, such as Attention Deficit Disorder, or ADD, are particularly contentious.

"An ADD diagnosis is very controversial, especially after a recent paper suggested some children with ADD 'grow out' of it at age 25," he says. "That would mean that ADD is a phase in development, rather than a disease. ... It is all fluid."

The health conscious communities must bond together to prevent fictitious medical advances and the accompanying flood of new drugs for a range of ills that threaten to "medicalize" every human condition and behavior, according to some experts.

In addition, they say the advent of genetic screening could eventually mean that apparently healthy people will be labeled "sick" decades before an actual diagnosis.