Speaker’s corner

Hypochondria is the only disease I don’t have. So said that most modest but widely read of all writers – the anonymous graffiti writer.

This column is dedicated to fellow hypochondriacs – those who, like me, when they read the symptoms of a disease know that that is what’s been troubling them.

Take note, there’s a book just for us: The Hypochondriac’s Handbook by John Naish. Is it serious? No. Well, yes. Depends. Naish is a health writer for The Times in London. For years he amassed quirky, scary and disgusting material on hypochondria, psychology, behaviour and lifestyle.

Be warned, his book could set you off worrying. Worrying, for instance, about burning candles. Candles sometimes have lead-impregnated wicks that release lead into the air (WARN YOU FRIENDS). Even lead crystal glasses taint your wine (they say).

Lead, as everybody knows, is an easily ingested heavy metal that somehow leaks upwards from the stomach to your head, turning it into porridge.

As a kid who played with unpainted toy soldiers made from lead I must have ingested a couple of kilograms. If I fell into a swimming pool my head would pull me down to the bottom, like an anchor, and I’d have to be hauled out feet first.

I often wonder what permanent effects lead had on my generation? Our cots were painted with lead-based paint. Even the wallpaper was impregnated with lead and our water was delivered via lead pipes (hence the expression “heavy water”).

I have little doubt that many of my problems are because of my lead intake. It could explain why I have a job lifting my head from my pillow each morning

On the other hand maybe, as Naish suggests, I am suffering from MHS – modern hypochondria syndrome.

I suspect most of us are developing a fascination for new diseases – the media’s fault because they go on and on about hazards, thus ensuring a gnawing anxiety about our health. The plethora of warning e-mails littered with exclamation marks adds to our anxiety.

Naish invented MHS but I have noticed most of my contemporaries have it. From what I understand, MHS is natural. Our brains have been programmed to worry about threats to our well-being. It’s a survival thing.

For millennia our brains told us how to react when, say, a sabre-toothed cat the size of a pick-up popped its head into our home. Under such circumstances we would stand stock still, lose control of our bowels and bladder (to lighten ourselves ready for takeoff), our hair would stand on end to make us look bigger, and we’d turn deathly pale as the blood drained from our skin to minimise excessive bleeding from surface wounds.

We also instinctively avoided drinking from pools infested by crocodiles. But now, even though the big cats have gone and the municipality filters out the crocs from our tap water, our brains remain programmed to worry about threats.

So we invent them. Hence our readiness to believe all these warnings on the web.

Doctors are forever helping to reinforce our anxieties. The medical profession is defining new diseases and the pharmaceutical industry designing new pills to deal with them.

The information industry stokes such fears, not deliberately but because readers get a certain satisfaction from reading that their dizzy spells are because of cellphones or the microwave or from a deficiency in a vitamin found only in Japanese seaweed.

But don’t feel bad. Many great people were hypochondriacs. Many say Charles Darwin was. So was Tennessee Williams and Hans Christian Andersen. Florence Nightingale knew, for 60 years, she was dying from an unknown malady. She died aged 90, saying, no doubt, “See, I told you”.