It was only after Brendon lost his house, his job, most of his friends, his wife and contact with his kids that he discovered he had a disease. 'It just got worse over the years. I was drinking whisky from first thing in the morning, up to two bottles a day. I hid my drinking until it got so bad I didn't care any more. I just couldn't stop it until I lost everything I had ever lived for,' said Brendon, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, which insists that alcoholism is not just an addiction or behavioural problem, but a full-blown disease.

'Alcoholism is a disease like any other, it's a physical condition, and people suffering from it need to be treated and helped, not victimised,' he said.

In the offices of the lobby group Action for ME, Brian Dow insists that what used to be dismissed as 'yuppie flu', then chronic fatigue syndrome, is also an illness, 'myalgic encephalomyelitis', even though there is no evidence, despite the name's suggestion, of brain infection. 'It is an illness,' said Dow. 'Calling it chronic fatigue syndrome is like calling Alzheimer's chronic forgetfulness - it just doesn't do justice to the condition.'

Children that used to be troublesome now suffer from ADHD - attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. Men who fail to perform are now suffering from 'erectile dysfunction', curable with a little blue pill. Middle-aged men who used to be grumpy are now suffering from the 'male menopause', in need of hormone therapy.

But last week, the doctors hit back. In a special edition of the British Medical Journal , the clinical publication of the British Medical Association, physicians and academics tried to turn back the tide on the 'medicalisation' of everyday life. People, who would previously learn to deal with common problems themselves now turn to their doctors for help - and the doctors have had enough. It is not only the patients they are fed up with, but their lobby groups and an unquestioning media and drugs companies determined to turn everything into a 'disease' in need of treatment.

They fear this medicalisation has gone too far and is harming society, preventing us from accepting our humanity. It encourages us to see ourselves as victims in search of a cure, perpetually suffering from one ailment or another.

In 1976, the writer Ivan Illich warned in a book, Limits to Medicine, that 'the medical establishment has become a major threat to health'. At the time, he was dismissed as a maverick, but a quarter of a century later, even the medical establishment is prepared to admit that he may well be right.

In its leader comment last week, the BMJ argued that there was almost certainly too much medicine and doctors should encourage people to look after themselves. 'The cost of trying to defeat death, pain and sickness is unlimited and, beyond a certain point, every penny spent may make the problem worse, eroding still further the human capacity to cope with reality,' it thundered.

The BMJ undertook a poll among British doctors to decide the top 'non-diseases' that are defined as medical conditions but that doctors feel shouldn't be. In first place came 'ageing', followed by work, boredom and bags under the eyes. But the list of bugbears continued through baldness and freckles, ugliness, jet lag, gap teeth, smoking, shortness, nail-biting, bad breath, allergies, shyness, insomnia, hairiness and diabetes.

From doctors and patients to drug companies and the media, there are relentless pressures to classify any condition as a disease. Richard Smith, the BMJ 's editor, wrote: 'Doctors, particularly some specialists, may welcome the boost to status, influence and income that comes when new territory is defined as medical. Global pharmaceutical companies have a clear interest in medicalising life's problems. Likewise companies manufacturing mammography equipment. Many journalists and editors still delight in mindless medical formulas, where fear-mongering about the latest killer disease is accompanied by news of the latest wonder drug.'

Dow, at Action for ME, says that having it accepted as a medical condition has definite advantages: 'If you don't validate it by calling it a condition or illness, you are almost saying it doesn't exist. People care about it being recognised as serious, and about doctors taking it seriously.'

Even people with conditions that definitely exist - such as alcoholism - can benefit from having it classified as a disease. Eric Appleby, the director of Alcohol Concern, doesn't classify it as a disease, but he understands why AA does: 'Calling it a disease takes any moral judgment out of it. It's a clear, straightforward message that can help a lot of people. If alcoholism is a disease, then the alcoholic is absolved of blame.'

But drug companies have a vested interest in disease-mongering - because they profit by providing cures. Conditions are hyped as diseases, mild conditions as devastating, rare conditions as common. Whereas shy people used to just rely on a glass of wine, Roche developed the drug Manerix to treat 'social phobia'. It initially claimed that one million Australians suffered this 'soul-destroying' disorder, but then admitted it couldn't even find enough people for clinical trials.

The drugs companies target newspapers with stories designed to create fear about a condition, and then company-sponsored advisory boards supply 'independent experts' for the stories, while consumer groups supply 'victims'. The drug companies argue that there are clear benefits to this system. Their drugs are popular because they improve lives.

Dr Iona Heath, head of ethics at the Royal College of General Practitioners, warns that there could also be clear downsides: 'Alternative approaches - emphasising the self-limiting or relatively benign natural history of a problem, or the importance of personal coping strategies - are played down or ignored. The disease-mongers gnaw away at our self-confidence. Inappropriate medicalisation carries the dangers of unnecessary labelling, poor treatment decisions, economic waste, as well as the costs that result when resources are diverted from treating or preventing more serious disease. At a deeper level, it may help to feed obsessions with health.'

When it was launched, Viagra quickly became one of the bestselling drugs of all time, presumably because men found it helped. But Kaye Wellings, director of the Centre for Sexual Health Research in London, warned that relying on these treatments could mean that people fail to address relationship problems: 'Thinking that a little blue pill will fix it could leave the underlying problems there. Doctor's don't want their surgeries full of people seeking medical solutions to their relationship problems.'

At a philosophical level, Illich argued in his book that death, pain and sickness are part of being human, and that cultures have developed the means to help people cope with all three. Modern medicine has destroyed these practices.

But with all these treatments, are we feeling any better? Apparently not. Studies by Amartya Sen, a Nobel-prize winning economist, show that the more a society depends on healthcare, the more likely are its inhabitants to consider themselves sick. In a world where perception is reality, perhaps we are better off with less medicine, not more.