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disease is not in general indexed by age. Further, the body is not present as something that gets used up and worn out: such stories have to be superadded. (Indeed, the category of being "worn out" was in earlier additions of the ICD but has since been removed). |
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If you rent a house, your agreement with the landlord includes a "fair use" or "normal wear and tear" category: it is expected that houses depreciate over time and this is written into the legal and tax codes. There are only two references to normal wear and tear in the whole ICD. First, one can as an adult step out of the well-ordered life and suffer from premature or delayed senility, puberty, birth, and aging. Among the conditions under "delay" are delayed birth, development (including intellectual, learning, reading, sexual, speech, and spelling), menstruation, and puberty. In this case the cycle structure is the same, but the patient is taking the steps too early or too late. Secondand there is only one example of thisyou could use your body badly. The only specific instance of this, however, is that you can grind or otherwise mismanage your teeth: |
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| 521 | Diseases of hard tissues of teeth | | 521.1 | Excessive attrition | | | Approximal wear. Occlusal wear | | (ICD-10, 1: 125) |
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In ICD-10, abrasion of teeth carries with it an illuminating set of contexts: dentifrice, habitual, occupational, ritual, and traditional. Occupational abrasion in earlier times included the hazard "tailor's tooth," for example, where the teeth were abraded due to biting off the thread in hand sewing. In principle, the timeless adult could do many things excessivelythere are categories for excessive thirst, secretion, salivation, sex drive, and sweating and binocular convergence among others. Such superfluity, however, is indexed only in this one case against an aging body. Note that there are of course diseases associated more broadly (and often implicitly) with excessive wear and tear, for example, cirrhosis of the liver associated with alcoholic excess. But here we are concerned directly with representation in the classification system. |
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This curious invisibility of aging as wear and tear is one way in which the ICD stabilizes context and disease entity, the human body as the substrate of both is outside the flow of time. The human adult body becomes the unmarked category, the cipher against which laboratory, social, and natural time must be coordinated. Indeed one could go a |
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