Perhaps it should be filed under the heading of the law of unintended consequences. With the best of intentions, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have, probably unwittingly, created some serious difficulties for employers with their recent pronouncements on disability issues.

The AMA has decided to label obesity as a medical disease, while in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the APA has added new disorders, among other changes.

These include social (pragmatic) communication disorder, a “persistent difficulty with verbal and nonverbal communication that cannot be explained with low cognitive ability,” and “mild neurocognitive disorder,” which “describes a level of cognitive decline” that “goes beyond normal issues of aging.”

Many experts now fear that, in conjunction with the Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act of 2008, these changes will provide many more opportunities for workers to claim a disability.

And that, as we all know, leads to more requests for accommodations and, inevitably, more lawsuits. Also, it is certain to lead to time-consuming efforts to provide reasonable accommodations and act as an added strain on employers' already limited resources.

What to do? Experts recommend that about all employers can do is embark on the interactive process required by the ADA to develop a reasonable accommodation to workers' disabilities.

But employers also should be mindful of the word “reasonable.” It would not be reasonable for instance, for a customer relations representative who is diagnosed with social communication disorder to be excused from having to talk to customers, because that is an essential job function.

Nor would any employer be expected to lower performance standards to accommodate an employee who has been diagnosed with mild cognitive disorder.

This will not necessarily protect employers from being targeted by an aggressive plaintiffs bar. But it will put them on solid ground in terms of being able to defend their rational employment decisions.