MEDICINE IS THE BEST MEDICINE.

Much of medical education is an art, but just as frequently, it is an exercise in pattern recognition. A woman of child-bearing age who presents with abdominal pain must be given a pregnancy test - while the team might suspect an appendectomy, ectopic pregnancy must be ruled out. Hypoparathyroidism presents with “bones, stones, groans, and psychological overtones.” Ask any medical student who has gotten through a year or more, and they will tell you that medicine is just as much about being a super-memorizer as it is being able to tease out a history that allows for proper diagnosis of a patient.

One of the problems with studying medicine, though, is that we know the symptoms. What we don’t know, we can access resources to find it out. We spend hours hunched over our pathology texts. Over time, it’s inevitable that we recognize patterns in our own systems that may be consistent with diseases - the rarer, the better. This phenomena is so common that it has a name - hypochondriasis of medical students, or medical students’ disease.

The condition was first referenced in the 1960s. Frequently, preoccupation with a specific disease has more to do with recent study, and once the student moves on to something else, the concern usually passes. It is widely prevalent in medical students, though currently viewed more as a manifestation of normal perception and learning than as a psychiatric illness. When learning about a new condition, the medical student examines the constellation of symptoms that make up the disease. The student may then subconsciously apply the relevant symptoms, while ignoring those that he does not have.

After awhile, these concerns usually go away. We move on to the next lesson, the next disease. I no longer worry about a sinus infection that goes rogue, becoming a meningitis. Even though I have recurrent pain in my great toe, I’ve stopped worrying that I have gout - I’m far too young and I don’t honestly consume enough protein to make it a realistic diagnosis. Over time, one might even gain the skill of actually talking themselves out of such ridiculous possibilities. And yet, that too is as much a curse as it is  blessing - just ask my friend with an 18-hour history of right lower quadrant pain… no fever, or nausea or vomiting… it was appendicitis after all… and that’s a story for another time.