to get annoyed at hypochondriacs?

[Ilovesunflowers]

A cold does not = flu.
A sore throat does not = tonsilitus.
Going out in the cold weather does not give you a cold.
You are not dying when you have a cold. You will feel like shit for a few days but you aren't that ill.
You do not need to go to the doctors for everything. Sometimes just waiting to see if something clears up on its own is the best course of action.

Rant over!

I read somewhere that having a cold feels very unpleasant and that when you have flu you feel like you're dying. Which I have found to be quite an accurate barometer.

Apart from all the people who say they feel like death when they have a cold.

Hypochondriacs do my head in. No, it does not make you more 'interesting' to always have something wrong with you. It makes you as boring as hell.

I also hate people who get all competitive about illness. If someone is really sick they always know 'just how they feel' because they had something similar, only worse, last year. Or people who try to equate some minor illness they had with some major illness someone else is going through- 'my doctor told me that apparently the symptoms for acute kidney failure are very very like the symptoms for that bug I had last week'.

My mum used to say that if you had the ability to moan and be dramatic about it you are never as ill as you claim to be.

Depends what you mean by 'hypochondriac', I guess. I've suffered from severe health anxiety (and still do, though I have learned ways of managing it), and I don't do any of the things described in the OP. If anything I tend to downplay any symptoms and keep them to myself out of fear of making it 'real', and I hate going to the doctor and avoid it if at all possible.

This is a real problem for a lot of people. Health anxiety used to be called hypochondria. It is not the same as drama-queen attention-seeking behaviour, and it is not something that anyone would choose to have.

I get positively murderous when people with a cold say they have 'flu.

Bloody attention-seeking dramatists.

I also judge people who go to the GP with a cold and get all huffy and indignant when the GP won't give them antibiotics.

Also annoying when people clog up doctors and A&E waiting rooms with minor things that could be sorted out with a quick purchase at the Chemist's, meaning genuinely ill people can be seen quicker.

YANBU.
I avoid asking certain people how they are as i just can't face the answer!

Gahhhh.

And please, if you're a normally healthy person, do not call an ambulance when you have a bit of D & V, I know it's not nice but it is not an emergency. I do not want to catch it whilst taking you're blood pressure and giving you advice on fluids etc and then pass it on to the next person I go to.The only reason you got an ambulance is because you said you had breathing problems ie you were breathing a bit fast after throwing up.
And as a result Mrs Miggins down the road has had to wait for an hour with a fractured hip on her bathroom floor cold and in pain but being stoic.
Rant over until next time.

My late grandad was an attention seeker who focused on health. Anyone who was diagnosed with anything, he'd had it worse and cured of it .

So my dad developing diabetes? He'd been cured of it years ago (how come they can't cure anyone else then, Grandad?)

Dad's quadruple heart bypass? Ditto

And so on.

He lived with Mum and Dad until his final 3 years when he went into a home. Their combined illnesses and disabilities meant they could no longer look after him properly. They even had to call an ambulance once as he's fallen and they simply couldn't lift him up. This is what prompted the move to a home for him. He resisted this; my parents had to resort to informing SW he couldn't come back to live with while he was in hospital after all reasoning had failed. They simply couldn't physically cope. And my mum's siblings were about as much use as a chocolate teapot. Four of them and none offered an alternative home. They'd seen how much trouble he'd caused my parents.

Mum was even given tests on her heart once because of some symptoms; turned out to be stress, at the time just before Grandad was finally moved into a home. My aunts and uncles could have done more.

So I guess you have two categories of people under the umbrella of hypochodria. The attention seekers or exaggerators, and the ones with a health anxiety, who deserve consideration.

Someone once told me that the definition of flu was that if you were upstairs in bed and someone told you there was £10,000 on your front doorstep you wouldn't/couldn't go downstairs and get it.

On that basis, I have certainly never had flu!

One of the most annoying ways of attention seeking on FB is when someone tags themselves in that they're at so and so hospital. Cue 20 comments asking what's up.

I am going to just post one of my regular bugbears. All this antihypochondria stuff can be dangerous....

I have just gone to the doctors with a cold. MY DH hassled me to as I appeared to be better then felt like I couldn't get up the day after all seemed fine. I had a severe chest infection. BTW I cycled to the docs (slowly!) for the appointment. It took about 90 seconds before they diagnosed the infection and gave my antibiotics. This is the third course of antibiotics I have had in 2 years for secondary infections. On none of these ocassions did I think I had anything worse than a cold. I also went into work. I used to just dose myself up and get on with it, but I have now got to accept that this is not the right advice. I have been told off for not going to the doctors sooner.

I also have two friends who did the same and ended up with Pneumonis. While they are young (ish) 30s they could fight it off but once it had got to pneomonia it was harder to fight than when it was a chest infection or cold.

My DS also spent a week in hopsital with "a cold" confirmed as such by the hospital lab who grew the cultures. Still meant he couldn't breath sats fell through the floor and needed very high oxygen levels. And then got a secodnary infection

Sometimes a cold is not just a cold. And sometimes we need antibiotics. That's what Doctors are there for.

I have a certain female relative by marriage who is always "ill", one year I had a colitis flare up, arthritis in my back and a dodgy thyroid, she went on and on and on about her sore throat while sipping lemsip on the sofa and watching me cook etc... She always has something, I think it is almost like a hobby...

I think it is a family thing, my famiy wont go to a doctor unless they are at deaths door. DH's family are there with a graze...

That doesn't mean you have to run to the doctors at the first sign of a sneeze though! It's about using common sense.

And from your description of your DS I am guessing his 'cold' was infact RSV bronchiolitis which although it is a form of the common cold in young children is well known to be dangerous and I doubt anyone would suggest a parent worried about their child's breathing didn't act!

Dear H,

A headache is not a brain tumour (we have the £500 bill in private medical fees for the brain scan to prove what I already knew).

A stomach ache does not equal stomach cancer.

Swollen glands does not equal throat cancer.

Constipation does not mean bowel cancer.

Hypochondria is not only annoying, it can be fucking expensive (and we aren't exactly well off).

Can I just agree with what Tee said upthread.
Yy we all know that there are people with anxiety issues/are genuinely ill etc. etc, but this is a light hearted thread about people that exaggerate their illnesses and are really annoying.

Nobody's quarrelling with that thereon. We are talking about people with mild illnesses blowing them up to be something they're not. There are people who call every ordinary cold 'the flu' , every headache a 'migraine' etc and its unfair on people who genuinely suffer from these things as people don't often fully appreciate the severity of them or why they might be off work for a while.

I have had real flu once in my life. It was god awful and I was on my back for ten days straight. I could not move and my fever was ridiculous.

I get colds I just get on with it, if it's bad cold i got to bed early with lemsip a good book and hot water bottle.

The most seriously ill i have been aside from recovering from major surgery was campolabacter, honest to god norovirus seems like a sneeze once you had real real food poisoning.

Maybe I was grumpy last night, after reading some comments about migraines whilst I was suffering from one myself. I do understand where people are coming from, IE colds and flu etc. Thing is though, many know the difference of those due to their own experience (I personally count my lucky chickens that I have never had flu so don't know exactly how bad it can be, but can imagine) but it would seem many actually don't know how migraines aren't that black and white. So maybe they shouldn't be going around self diagnosing others with headaches before actually finding out that that one migraine they had at x time, when they couldn't lift their head up, open their eyes, have any noise around them and struggling to not puke may be the typical symptoms of a migraine, but that there are different types and can and do vary.

That is all I am asking I suppose, for people to not make a judgement without facts. I

Yadnbu I know someone in my family like this always going on about this that and how she has a Serbia but the doctors won't operate because they are lying about her not having one for money she has PCOS but when I asked apparently its without actual costs she just has the weight gain caused by PCOS and ahem mentioned he nice has undisguised asbergers I was full of sympathy mention my deis going through a autisim diagnosis to be told her niece is worse than my dd who she hasn't seen in a year ( full sympathy for asbergers btw I just don't think its right to see a PDD as a pissing contest ) now when I call she asks dd symptoms so she can say niece is worse.

sorry on phone its a hernia not sernia and PCOS without actual cysts not costs.

Well I have suffered three migraines in my life, all quite close together in my teens, and having experienced them I can safely say they are nothing like normal headaches. The first time, when I did not know what was happening to me, I thought I was going to die. I realise that if you are a regular sufferer of migraine then perhaps you get the classic symptoms but possibly in varying, anymore moderate degrees of awfulness, so maybe you have the visual disturbance and the nausea, an some pain, but not so severely that you cannot function normally iyswim.

But I certainly could not have been on the internet (not that it even existed then grin]) during my migraines. My God, I couldn't stand up, or speak, or do anything whatsoever except curl into a ball, vomit and focus on the mindblowing pain. Go on the the internet? I don't think so.

anymore? That should have said 'and'

Can't find it right now, but if people are interested in migraine symptoms/types of migraine, there is a parallel thread somewhere about them.