Med Student Syndrome

There exists a phenomenon called "medical student syndrome," where when a medical student learns about a rare disease, they become convinced that they suffer from it, because they share some of the same symptoms at times. This may happen to the student over and over again throughout the course of their medical education. There is another condition called "conversion disorder," where psychological stress manifests itself as real symptoms, such as pain or paralysis, experienced by the patient with no obvious physical cause.

I'm pretty sure I have some strange combination of these two disorders. Rather than learn about a disease and think I have it because I've experienced those symptoms in the past, I actually start getting the symptoms of whatever we are learning about. These symptoms are real, and usually scare me to death. I had severe chest pain radiating into my left arm when we were studying the cardiovascular system and heart attacks. I had several bouts of acute, 20-minute losses of vision when we were learning about ophthalmology. I was awakened from sleep by a sudden, strong pain and swelling in my leg the night after we learned about deep venous thrombosis. And so on.

My policy has become this: do nothing, unless the symptoms don't stop once we've finished the unit we are learning. Every one of these bouts of symptoms I have had have cleared up as soon as I finished studying that medical topic. Weird, huh? I wonder if this just happens to me or whether it's more common among my peers than I realize.