You just may have medical student syndrome when/if:

Medical student syndrome

(Don’t laugh…these have all happened, one or two to me, and many more to friends and colleagues and playmates etc of mine. And I am in no way laughing at people who suffer from any of the mentioned diseases, or any of their symptoms. Merely commenting on how paranoid/self involved/weird medical students and doctors can be).

You just may have medical student syndrome when/if:

Your stomach grumbles and you become convinced you have coeliac disease and spend the afternoon reading coeliac support forums instead of studying about chronic renal failure. Then you go and buy a sandwich made with gluten free bread to see how you will adjust to your new lifestyle.

After running 5 kilometres you get a pain on the right side of your abdomen, and wonder if you can do your surgical presentation on yourself, after the general surgeons have whipped out that vestigial organ of course.

You are convinced your liver hurts after a particularly big night out (more likely to be gastritis). Then during that big night out you were bitten by mosquitoes on your exposed arms and become concerned the next day about chronic liver failure.

You feel tired and start wondering how your treatment for leukaemia will fit around your med school finals.

You really, really hope that your inability to finish a sentence or remember what you were thinking about is because of tiredness, and not thought block as a sign of schizophrenia.

That cold just won’t clear up….and you think you fall into the 4% of people with cystic fibrosis who are diagnosed after the age of 20. And start wondering if you should be checking your lung function. (And if your sweat is unusually salty).

Despite your rampantly infected wisdom tooth, you wonder how likely it is that you will get myelosupppression from your ABVD treatment for that Hodgkin’s lymphoma and have to sit out ward rounds to avoid catching anything from/passing anything on to patients.

You become very concerned that your classmate cannot elicit a jawjerk reflex during a neuro examination during Introduction to Clinical Skills.

Any visual disturbance has you reading up on multiple sclerosis and considering taking megadoses of vitamin D in a bid to stave off demyelination.

You wonder if your neuroscience marks can be blamed on a parasite that has caused iron deficiency anaemia and impaired intellectual development.

You take your own blood into the pathology department to get a FBC and a blood smear done. You take along the results of these tests to your GP the next week when he gives you the results from the FBC he ordered, just to compare.

You are afraid of reading the DSM after you identified just a little too much with the criteria for Asperger's/bipolar/anxiety/adjustment disorder/internet addiction.

Any others? I am sure many books could be written/lines in Harrison's could be ticked off.

Up next:
Medical student syndrome #2.
Medical student syndrome by proxy. When you diagnose other people.