The parents' role in a medical setting

This applies to so many parents who insist that their child has a mental illness. 

From The Healing Paradox, by Steven Goldsmith, MD. 

"My agreement of her parents' definition of it (anorexia nervosa) as an illness would have doomed treatment because only doctors' definitions of it are supposed to be able to cure illnesses, and parents are supposed to hover over an ill child. Such a definition (anorexia nervosa) would have reinforced this family's pathology and provided no leverage for change. Moreover, the label, like all conventional medical diagnoses, reflects Medicine's attempt to isolate the disease as a discrete, namable entity as a thing, rather than a pattern of dysfunction and a disturbance of relationships. By doing so, Medicine minimizes its chances of effectively altering those relationships and curing the dysfunction."

STEVEN GOLDSMITH received his MD at the Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons. In the last forty years he has practiced medicine, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and homeopathy and has held faculty and staff positions at the Boston University, Tufts University, and New York University Schools of Medicine. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he maintains a practice that emphasizes natural solutions for mental and physical illness.