Polydipsia Polydipsia Polydipsia is excessive thirst or excess drinking. The word derives from the Greek () "very thirsty", which is derived from (, "much, many") + (, "thirst"). Polydipsia is a nonspecific symptom in various medical disorders. It also occurs as an abnormal behaviour in some non-human animals, such as in birds. This symptom is characteristically found in diabetics, often as one of the initial symptoms, and in those who fail to take their anti-diabetic medications or whose condition is poorly controlled. It can also be caused by a change in the osmolality of the extracellular fluids of the body, hypokalemia,
Functional symptom as medicine. A common trend is to see functional symptoms and syndromes such as fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome and functional neurological symptoms such as functional weakness as symptoms in which both biological and psychological factors are relevant, without one necessarily being dominant. Functional symptom A functional symptom is a medical symptom, with no known physical cause. It arises from a problem in the ‘functioning’ of the nervous system, and not due to a structural or pathologically defined disease. Functional symptoms are increasingly viewed within a framework in which psychological, physiological and biological factors should be considered to be relevant. Historically,