(HealthScoutNews) -- Having a small penis is not a disease. Neither is boredom, ugliness, baldness, road rage or big ears.

That's the opinion of 570 respondents who voted on the top 20 non-diseases in a reader survey in the April 13 British Medical Journal, a special issue that examines the limits of medicine.

The purpose of the survey was to prompt debate on what is or isn't a disease, and the increasing tendency to classify more and more of people's problems as diseases, says editor Richard Smith.

"A lot of doctors, in some ways, are victims of medicalization, of more and more of life's problems being seen as diseases or medical problems," Smith says.

"If all of life's miseries and unhappiness can be seen as medical problems, then they all fall on doctors. They feel themselves under tremendous pressure. They also feel themselves to have a very limited capacity to help," Smith says.

Among the other top conditions the respondents called "non-diseases" were bags under the eyes, gray hair, jet lag, cellulite, hangovers, ignorance, pregnancy, and "allergy to the 21st century."

And rounding out the top 20 list from a list of 200 in the survey were: aging; work; freckles; gray or white hair; ugliness; childbirth; unhappiness, and loneliness.

Smith stresses that the survey isn't meant to suggest that the suffering of people with these non-diseases isn't genuine.

"The main point of the exercise was just to spell out to people that it's not easy to say this person's got a disease and this person hasn't. The whole nature of disease and abnormality is rather tricky to define, and all sorts of factors come into play," Smith says.

While some readers were critical of the survey -- calling it an absurd exercise -- Smith says it raises important issues. Not many doctors or other people have given much thought to differentiating between disease and non-disease.

"There's a vague idea that diseases may be like species of animals or plants -- that they're sort of out there in nature -- and the job of doctors is to uncover them and to list them, to classify them. I think really that's a very naive view of what's a disease and what isn't," Smith says.

He notes there are six different definitions or methods that doctors can use to classify someone as being in normal health.

There are both pros and cons to having your problem defined as a disease, Smith says. If it's labeled a disease you're more likely to receive sympathy instead of blame, and you may feel you have an explanation for your suffering. You may be justifiably excused from obligations and commitments such as work.

However, there are substantial downsides to having a disease diagnosis. You may have trouble getting insurance, a mortgage or a job. The stigma of some diseases is worse than the disease itself. You may come to consider yourself flawed and incapable of overcoming your condition.

Smith says it's impossible to resolve the debate about what is or isn't a disease.

"That's the point that we're making -- that these are all rather arbitrary judgments, rather slippery," he says. "And we should be aware of that. I personally believe that defining more and more of life's problems as diseases and medical problems is counterproductive for everybody in the end," Smith says.

Dr. Richard Levinson, associate executive director of the American Public Health Association, says it's essential to have this discussion about non-diseases.

"There is benefit from this type of debate, and the benefit is about how we want to structure our health-care system," Levinson says.

"I think every nation in the world has run out of the ability to readily afford its health-care delivery system. And so they have to make serious decisions about what really belongs there, what should be compensated for, what should be covered and what shouldn't," he says.

The looser you are with your definitions of disease, the greater the economic and social consequences to society, Levinson adds.

However, it can be difficult to make decisions about what is actually a disease.

"The way illness is defined in not black and white. There are lots and lots of shades of gray. In fact, much of it is shades of gray," Levinson says.

What to Do: To read more about this survey, visit the British Medical Journal.

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