I agree with your interpretation entirely, for what it's worth. Addiction is a technical term, and sex doesn't meet criteria. Can still be part of disordered or problematic behavior, but it is not the same as, say, an addiction to heroin. Hence the term 'compulsive gambling' as opposed to 'gambling addiction.'

What exactly do you mean by addiction, then? Because I'm with Eli (nice guy, by the way) and other sex researchers who say that you can't be addicted to sex because you can't develop a tolerance for it and a physiological dependence on it. Those things are what addiction means, at least in a diagnostic sense, so…

Could we address the fact (and perhaps on future Doug Barry posts) that Doug Barry simply and clearly misrepresented the content of science article - not a spin, not an angle, but a clear and unambiguous misrepresentation. As in the article says 'white' and he writes a post that says 'black.' The lead author of the…

I'm just going to leave this here: It's not about the nail.

If the debate was about pornography: Marty Klein inevitably has lots to say about pornography (c.f., http://www.martyklein.com/people-who-fee…).

...soaked in oil at high temperatures...

I would much rather measure a charity by what it accomplishes, not by either the money it receives or the money it spends. If there was a charity dedicated to reducing homelessness, I would count that charity a success if homelessness went down. If we were to compare two charities who had the same effect on…

I feel bad for thinking this, but it seems... uncomfortable that the purebred dog/cat exhibition is in Germany.

I'm just going to leave this here: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pall…

I'm glad that there were RCTs done around the criteria, but let's be honest - they're still arbitrary numbers. Think just of the probabilities - what are the odds that the EXACT right number that would best distinguish between normal and disordered eating is a multiple of 3? A good clinician will treat these numbers…

It would certainly make interacting with the medical world easier, but their diagnostic criteria aren't any better. And no, NIMH is not going to ICD-10 (or 9; much of the US is still on 9); they're going to make their own thing. Which I appreciate, but is only going to make things worse in the short term.

No, and they're not disorders. The DSM-V isn't actually expanding definitions very broadly; there's some indication that the number of people meeting criteria might actually fall. That being said, the DSMs (starting with III, the first one I paid attention to) are so deeply flawed as to be worse than useless.

I'm certainly never going to defend Zucker or most of his research. Fetishes in particular I would argue are not useful as diagnostic categories - if it causes distress, or reflects an impulse control problem, then treat those things. If somebody just likes feet, eh, who cares.

"Science writing" has a pretty broad definition at the blog level, so I'll take what I can get.

Eating disorders aren't really my area, but: Word.

Seriously. "Binge eating is at the center of...anorexia nervosa." Wow.

I think it's a complicated issue, and how we decide whether something is a 'normal age change' vs. a 'constructed problem' isn't straightforward. Vision changes do have their own massive marketing arm, with glasses and contacts and surgery...

Or solving a real problem. Vision gets worse as you get older, too - couldn't be more natural, in fact - but we treat to bring vision back to the way it was when you were younger. Is a change in testosterone different?

There is a lot of debate in the sex research and treatment world about what the nature of sexual desire is for women, with some supporting the 'responsive' model and others supporting the older 'spontaneous desire' model. It seems that some women (and men, although the difference seems to be smaller) fall in both…

There are drugs that have been proposed to treat low desire in women (Flibanserin is one), but, until very recently, the FDA hasn't shown any interest in approving them. The side-effect profile was quite mild, but the FDA's response was that it wasn't worth the risk just to increase desire in women.