Always feeling the symptoms of any disease you happen to read about
Dr. Monty Wyndrush writes- “ It’s the power of suggestion and the solution is to stop reading about diseases in the first place though with a health-obsessed media it is virtually impossible not to hear about stuff you’d rather not know. Yet, if you just can’t help hearing , it pays to resist the temptation to then consult those home diagnostics books which every household has in the shelf. These are known to be hotbeds of germs, viruses, infections and contagions , because over the years their pages have been thumb-licked , pawed and spluttered over by people with rashes, fungal growths and all manner of rampant afflictions. Whilst self-diagnosis on the net does not expose you to this kind of contamination the medical information you find there is so detailed and graphic that perfectly healthy people can be safely left for dead after only a few minutes of on-line research . And then there are those compulsive readers of labels in Boots who by the end of a single line of shelves are fighting for breath and in a state of collapse.
The fear is always that the merest suggestion of a sore throat, cough, itch, rash ,headache , hypertension , fatigue tingle, numbness, freckle, could always be the first symptom the Big One , and the problem then for self-diagnosed patients is either to leave the doctor out of the equation altogether or to shop around to find one who agrees with them. ”
(Monica Bent, Ayesbury) - QQQ**
