Münchausen syndrome

Hospital addiction
Illness addicts
Compulsion to have medical attention
Feigned disorders
Pretended illness
Elaboration of symptoms

Nature

The affected person seeks unnecessary medical attention -- often including repeated surgery. Patients usually travel widely and tell false stories. They may use trickery to produce symptomatic indications of illness or conditions. Part of the attraction for medical treatment is the care and attention they receive. Another is that being ill carries other tangible gains, such as sick leave from work.

Background

The condition was named in 1951 after the fictional 18th-century German baron, a fanaticist who wove fantastic stories around his wartime adventures.

Incidence

One woman in the UK had national health medical treatment estimated at £500,000, including 42 unnecessary operations on her stomach. A man convinced 23 hospitals that he had a kidney stone by putting a pebble under his back when he went for X-rays.

Claim

Those who feign sick are really sick after all: they are suffering from the psychiatric disorder of pathological lying. The pretenders are generally misdiagnosed: they are sent for surgery when they should be sent for psychiatry.

A deeper problem is at issue: the seemingly irresistible tendency in modern society to medicalize everything. All facets of the human condition are now routinely translated into disease-language – we have trade in original sin for original sickness; and we are encouraged to believes, in our therapeutic society, there is a pill for every ill. So long as we promote disease-mongering attitudes, we cannot expect that people will not play the system – and it can be no accident that a third of all "pretenders" are themselves health-care professionals.