Disease of the Month 1
Back in the olden days, when I was a young ‘un and almost everyone read Readers Digest, there was a joke that doctors subscribed to that magazine so they could see the disease article of the month and prepare for the monthly onslaught of Readers Digest subscribers convinced they were about to die.
The disease of the month usually had three characteristics:
- It was a real and often deadly and scary disease.
- It was very very rare.
- Most of the persons who diagnosed themselves as having it were somewhere between delusional and nutters and frequently at least mildly narcissistic.
Later, a large number of persons I knew claimed with much authority and no doctor’s diagnosis that they suffered from hypoglycemia, though the truth was that most of them just ate too much of the wrong things too often.
At Science Two dot Oh, Hank Campbell spots a new trendy disease of the month. (I used to know someone who actually had this ailment. In real life, it is not something to be taken casually.)
September 3, 2012 at 12:33 pm
Interesting angle but this is a lede for the Fool’s Hall of Fame: “Are you white and a little resentful that black people get their own cool disease, sickle cell anemia?” I had wondered what the gluten-free fad was about but not had the patience to dig around. So what it means is it’s another part of the old phenom of slight white hypochondria in which those subject presume themselves to be more astute than they are and self-diagnose as suffering from a serious condition they’ve recently heard about, taken out of context, in a crap mag, crap newspaper, crap tv or in gossip from a like-minded friend.