The Medical Student Syndrome

A subwiki to Elftown Meds



This is the place for medical students to share their experiences with the infamous Medical Student Syndrome*.

---

[morima]: There was a period that the notion of cancer freaked me out. Bad! Every time I had a headache (which was -- still is -- a lot of times, being a med student), brain tumors came to my mind. Scary stuff.

---

[Phoxx]: Finally a place to talk about this stuff with people that will probably understand me. Sometimes during lecture I hear all these sympthoms and I go like: I've got that, and that, and that too, and that... Oh no, I've got that disease!
And I've got all these enlarged lymph knodes in my neck and around my mandible.. and then you hear all the stuff about cancer, Hodgkin disease and stuff. I really worry about that and sometimes still do, but I guess I'm being silly. I have extreme exzema in neck and on head/face, which is an inflammation of the skin, which probably causes the lymph nodes to swell (doesn't it? There I go again)

Yup, Medical Student Syndrome is definately something I suffer from... I wonder if it is in DSM-IV?

---

[The Red Baron]: I was showering one day and the electricity went out. All went black and I was still under the shower. I felt something protruding and round in my left axilla and at that moment all my sanity left me. I had thought that I have lymphadenopathy attributed to male breast cancer (which, though rare, is an aggressive type of tumors). I was in a way or another preparing myself not to survive this, and when the power was back on, I verified it. To my relief it was just acne vulgaris.




-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
*Medical Student Syndrome: The condition at the point during their medical education at which the medical student, in their encountering the vast number of various pathological conditions there is, would become wrongfully convinced of themself being affected by said condition.