God, I'm fascinated by that moniker. But I digress...

Given the nature of many of your posts, I have to ask: did that really happen? I guess it doesn't matter (except possibly to you) because it happens so often anyway -- that exact scenario, in fact. Yes, I work in an ER and have been involved in emergency medicine for decades. I've seen this particular set of circumstances literally hundreds of times. It's infuriating and potentially dangerous. It certainly isn't a manifestation of hypochondria either, but you knew that.

If it really did happen and the ER staff were unable or incompetent to help, you have three options: 1) go back there and scream really loud (seriously); 2) go to another ER (or a walk-in acute care facility if there is one handy, a better choice usually than the ER anyway, for acute but not emergent problems);or 3) take the Motrin and gut it out til Monday, call your primary physician and explain what is going on, and do not take no for an answer. This isn't funny, even if it's only hypothetical. I guarantee you it's happening to someone for real (if not you) at this very moment.

Great article, really made me laugh, and sadly, I relate to it. So far this year I've diagnosed myself with diabetes, kidney failure, ovarian cancer and bowel cancer. Unlike Jennifer Traig, though I can't laugh about it, because it's been a source of huge fear and anxiety for me. I'm so frightened of not being able to earn a living if I'm really sick, and end up on living on the street where I'll surely die from the sheer discomfort. Yes, homelessness and destitution is where my hypochondria leads me, though I obsess about my health in secret, mostly.

And like the author, I have a raft of real, chronic disorders, but also a whole load of things that can't be treated by a doctor, but make me a weak and weedy specimen, compared to the hardy folk around me. Nonetheless, I'd say that overall, my health is relatively ok. As long as I really don't have ovarian cancer, which I should find out about soon.

My hypochondria stems from a very traumatic past, that's left me with huge free-floating anxieties and insecurity. I need some hook on which to hang all that fear and it looks like my health is one of the hooks. Also, I'm extremely sensitive. Like some poster here just mentioned, I think that hypochondriacs tend to be extremely sensitive people, and are hyper-aware of sensations and 'symptoms' in their bodies. Neurological tests have shown that highly sensitive people (known to scientists as 'neurotic' or 'introverted') have a chronically 'aroused' nervous system, and exhibit much lower thresholds for tolerance of pain or noise.

CAM can be a godsend for hypochondriacs. I've spent a relatively large part of my life and income trying to make my real and imagined disorders more bearable, with various herbs and diets, and other forms of healing, and I'm now considerably healthier and stronger in my forties than I was in my twenties or thirties, when I was pretty sickly.

I was quite lucky in that my doctor is quite open to her patients self-diagnosing -she says it makes her job easier, and I did actually self-diagnose a severe chronic problem that had really hampered my life - no doctor had cottoned on to what the symptoms actually represented. The diagnosis was a huge turning point for me. So I think there is a balance to be had between letting your paranoia run away with you, and being aware of when your intuition tells you that something is truly wrong with you. It can sometimes be difficult to tell the paranoid imaginings and intuition apart.

It's easy to scorn hypochondriacs, but it's really not easy being one. I can think of many other things I'd rather be.

This is the kind of attitude that killed my mother-in-law.

She died of advanced cancer, whose symptoms she had ignored for over a year, saying it was just a little backache. She put the wasting down to osteoporosis -- which was true, she did have it, because the cancer had spread to her bones.

This woman routinely dismissed her children's potentially serious illnesses as "just allergies".

The other side of the family have a tradition of not going to doctors and of dismissing symptoms for fear they represented terminal illness. This indirectly killed my father-in-law, who didn't get a second opinion after a doctor diagnosed his pancreatic cancer as "acid reflux."

It left my wife afraid to go to a doctor at all for fear of either being laughed at as a hypochondriac or told she had an incurable illness.

Fortunately, I am of a different heritage. My mother's family believe not only in checking out physical discomforts to rule out serious problems, but they believe that patients should be informed. Reading medical journals and looking things up on line is normal for them. Several times, my grandmother's "hypochondria" enabled her and her doctors to identify actual illnesses that would have been overlooked by someone unwilling to listen to her "hysteria". She lived to be 98.

I have spent the last six years of my life convincing this brilliant, otherwise sensible woman that openness about medical realities is much better than dismissing self-care as hypochondria.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that fibromyalgics until recently were dismissed as flakes because the disease "didn't exist". I'm as intolerant of that attitude as I am of the idea that all depression can be cured by activity and "long walks in the fresh air". That doesn't work for everybody, and if it did some of us would still be out of luck. Limited mobility, suburban sprawl and urban spew don't support your idyllic 1910 rural fantasy.

Sure, one illness can be mistaken for another, but it's never wrong to look into it and make sure. Going to doctors for minor complaints is not a symptom of narcissism, I don't care what you saw on "ER". You are the people who should get over yourselves and face reality.