Heart Attack: It makes your doctor proud

If you want your doctor to think highly of you, have a heart attack, or failing that, leukaemia will just about do.

And if you have fibromyalgia or a nervous problem, you run the risk of social ostracism and being shunned by your doctor.
Doctors have a chart of ‘prestigious diseases’ with heart attack right there at the top, a new survey has revealed.

Doctors in Norway were asked to rank a range of 38 diseases based on the prestige they felt the illnesses were viewed by the medical profession. 

Myocardial infarction (heart attack) came top, followed by leukaemia, spleen rupture, brain tumour and testicular cancer.  Fibromyalgia, anxiety neurosis, hepatic cirrhosis, depressive neurosis, schizophrenia and anorexia were at the bottom of the prestige rankings.

There’s a serious element to the poll.  It suggests that nervous and ‘mental’ problems are not taken seriously by the medical establishment – something that a sufferer may already have noticed.

(Source: Social Science & Medicine, doi: 10.1016/j.socimed. 2007.07.003).

Click here to receive health news by email.