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James Le Fanu
Robinson, £7.99, pp 316
ISBN 1 84119 305 4
Rating: ***
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Patients
expect us to be able to explain why they feel like they do and to be
able attach a diagnostic label to all their symptoms, however weird and
wonderful. It says something about modern medicine that patients often
feel relieved at having something “legitimate” wrong with
them, however awful. They have been vindicated. They are no longer time
wasters, malingerers, or hypochondriacs, but “ill” and
worthy of the doctors
attention.
A readers query
about unexplainable, episodic sneezing was the catalyst for James Le
Fanu to allow his Daily Telegraph column to become a forum for
sharing information about mysterious symptoms. Other readers (which
sometimes included medical specialists) often offered a possible
explanation and discussed a treatment that had
worked.
This book pulls these
columns together and categorises them into different body parts.
Therefore the authors are really Daily Telegraph readers, who
are acknowledged in eight pages at the back. The format is a query (or
a few similar queries) followed by comment (occasionally attributed to
medical experts but mostly anonymous). Some poor souls get no
explanations at all for their symptoms, so are left to wonder why they
experience pins and needles or a “Chinese burn” over their
whole body. Then again, maybe they are the lucky ones. Well, if you
were feeling well but had a bothersome drippy right nostril, would you
expect the explanation to be that you might be leaking cerebral spinal
fluid?
Evidence based medicine this
is certainly not. However, this is anecdotal medicine at its best. In
the absence of double blind randomised controlled trials looking at the
treatment of “April bowel” and “clicking ears”
(dont laugh—the symptoms an unsettled stomach when it
rains and hearing continuous loud clicks in one or both ears are very
real and disabling for some people, especially when others might think
them mad), it is a valuable
resource.
