READER'S DIGEST RECOMMENDED READ: Dangerous Diagnoses

Can a doctor’s diagnosis make you iller than you are?

- Richard Osman

OFTEN, WHEN WE describe a medical condition as “psychosomatic”, what we actually mean is “not real”. But this is a mistake that nobody who reads Suzanne O’Sullivan’s endlessly thought-provoking book is likely to make again. As she demonstrates through a collection of fascinating case studies from across the world, just because you’re suffering from an illness not caused by any disease, that doesn’t mean you’re not suffering from an illness.

According to O’Sullivan (a London-based neurologist), every illness has—to a greater or lesser extent—three elements. Two are the physical and the psychological, with our fear that there might be something wrong causing the brain to pick out aches and pains it would normally leave in the background as part of the body’s “white noise”. The third is cultural: that people learn from those around them—and from their communities’ prevailing beliefs—the form the illness should take.

This certainly applies to the book’s most striking cases: girls from immigrant families in Sweden who take to bed unable to move or eat for months, even years; the US embassy staff in Cuba in 2017 who believed they were being attacked by some sort of sonic ray in what had long been an enemy country, and developed shared symptoms that no tests could explain.

But the same thing also affects our more everyday experiences of medicine. For O’Sullivan, one problem in the West is over-diagnosis. On the whole, people feeling ill want to have a known disease diagnosed, and doctors want to find one. But what if the symptoms are a signal that something else in their lives isn’t right? In fact, a diagnosis can lead to people acting—and even being—iller than they are…