A Los Angeles-based man is filing a lawsuit against his former doctor after he was diagnosed with “chronic homosexuality” during a routine physical.

46 year-old Michael Moore told how he discovered the note on his medical records following a physical with Dr Elaine Jones of Torrance Health Association in April last year.

When asked by her patient to remove the note, Dr Jones defended her diagnosis, claiming the medical community goes “back and forth” on whether homosexuality is considered a chronic illness.

Homosexuality was once listed as a sociopathic personality disturbance in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but was removed from the list in 1974.

Moore said he had eventually been told in a letter that the detail had been deleted, but later discovered that it had merely been altered from a “medical condition” to a “medical problem”, leading him to take legal action – seeking punitive and compensatory damages.

Claiming that the lawsuit is in part for young people, Moore told NBC, “If a young person went in, and was told by a physician that their normal and healthy sexuality was a medical problem or disease, that could be very devastating”.

The Torrance Health Association issued a statement (see above) claiming that the diagnosis was recorded due to human error, and that upon notification by the patient, the record was corrected.

The suit suggests that the company “engaged in a pattern of deceit and medical record doctoring in an attempt to establish that they had earlier removed and retracted the defamatory content, when in fact they had not removed and retracted the defamatory content until the latter part of May 2014”.