The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. and Death. by Gene Weingarten Read Free Book Online

thousands of people
who had not had a health problem the day before.
Every endocrinologist in America immediately purchased a second yacht.
    Here’s a recent newspaper story reporting the final days of convicted Virginia cop killer Roy Bruce Smith. Mr. Smith requested a last meal consisting of a glass of Welch’s grape juice, one-eighth level teaspoon of Epsom salts, and unleavened bread made with olive oil. He had been eating nothing else for months. His lawyer disclosed that Mr. Smith believed many of the world’s health problems, including cancer and diabetes, are caused by soy, and that to counter any ill effects, people should eat more foods containing magnesium, including Epsom salts and Rolaids. Mr. Smith spent the last month of his life bargaining with his cell mates for Rolaids. His biggest regret, he told his lawyer, was that he could not get this information out to the world. Also, he had figured out a way to achieve cold fusion. This secret, too, died with him. He was executed by a lethal injection of soy sauce. 2
    Now that all this information has been published in an actual book, I predict hypochondriacs all over the country will start gobbling Rolaids.
    Not that that will save them from flesh-eating bacteria.
    Remember flesh-eating bacteria? They entered the public consciousness a few years ago, more or less the way the AIDS virus enters the human body: right up the wazoo. Some doctor somewhere in some reputable medical journal reported that there was a microorganism that digests protein, and if it gets into an open wound it will, ahem, consume flesh. Pretty soon the responsible media got onto this story, quoting experts, prudently cautioning against panic, noting dispassionately that there was a germ out there that could, under certain conditions, EAT YOUR FACE OFF.
    Instantly this reached the supermarket tabloids, in particular one supermarket tabloid called the
Weekly World News,
and thatpretty much was the ball game. The
Weekly World News
makes the
National Enquirer
look like Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason.
As I recall, the
Weekly World News
promptly informed America that a CANNIBAL MICROBE was ON THE RAMPAGE, turning ordinary humans into
    BLOBS OF GOO.
    I do not mean to disparage the
Weekly World News.
The
Weekly World News
is a fabulous newspaper. I say that as a knowledgeable journalist who has worked at several major American newspapers. Not one of them was cool enough to report a cure for cancer but put it on page 27, under a story about a man who eats cockroaches.
    Once the tabloids got hold of the flesh-eating-bacteria story, hypochondriacs began to appear in their doctors’ offices whimpering and pointing with horror at their zits.
    This, of course, was silly. Ordinary-looking pimples do not remotely resemble the skin eruptions created by flesh-eating bacteria.
    Ordinary-looking pimples resemble the skin eruptions caused by a malignant tumor of the adrenal gland.
    1 This illustrates a psychological phenomenon known as “superstitious behavior.” In one study, behavioral scientists placed a dozen pigeons in boxes and fed each bird pellets of food at completely random intervals, to see what would happen. After a few days, the pigeons were behaving bizarrely. One was hopping up and down on one foot; another was moving in circles with one wing raised; a third was incessantly scratching the wall, etc. The scientists eventually theorized that because there was no rhyme or reason to the feeding schedule, the birds had leaped to the conclusion that whatever they had just been doing immediately before they got a pellet—whatever random act—must have prompted the feeding. So they began doing that one thing more and more, and each time they were fed, it reinforced this belief. This is the only specific lesson I recall from four years as a psychology major in college.
    2 Wouldn’t that have been
great?

Hypochondria and Me

    When I was twelve years old, my classmate