Product Description

When every hiccup sounds like the call of doom, each stomach pang hints at incipient cancer, and a headache means it's time to firm up your last will and testament, The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death. provides just the relief you need. Gene Weingarten has spent his whole life immersed in the eclectic details of bizarre symptoms, self-diagnosing every minor ache as a potentially deadly disease. Weingarten examines:

• The mind of a hypochondriac
• How your doctor can kill you
• Ulcers and other visceral fears
• The snaps, crackles, and pops of your body that spell disaster
• Things that can take an eye out
• Interpreting DocSpeak

Blending the neurotic anxieties of Woody Allen, the folksiness of Garrison Keillor, and the absurdist vision of Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten conjures up a hilarious prescription for the hypochondriac that lurks inside all of us.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #439773 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Booklist
If even paranoids have real enemies, Washington Post "Sunday Style" editor Weingarten humorously demands respect for his own minor mental derangement. Before heading to Washington D. C., Weingarten ran the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine. Miami colleague Dave Barry's foreword reveals some stylistic similarities: like Barry, Weingarten takes an ordinary--or only slightly odd--situation and pushes it to its limit. There's a fair amount of true medical information scattered amid satire, sidebars, and tongue-in-cheek charts in chapters on hypochondria, the hypochondriac's relationship with physicians, and a range of behaviors, symptoms, and conditions (e.g., headaches, hiccups, heart disease, tumors, ulcers, obesity, smoking, alcoholism, pregnancy, excretion, and "things that can take out an eye"). Weingarten proudly claims a lifetime of hypochondria, a disease abruptly cured several years ago when he was diagnosed with hepatitis C: what doctors call "the next epidemic." So perhaps Weingarten is a posthypochondriac who recalls the pleasures of imaginary illnesses while coping with all-too-real health problems. Mary Carroll

Review
Jackie Jones Bleecker The San Diego Union-Tribune The definitive laugh-out-loud handbook....Hilarious. And Scary. -- Review

Review
New York Daily NewsFlat out the funniest book on hypochondria ever written.

Alexandra JacobsEntertainment WeeklyWeingarten half-merrily, half-anxiously dispenses with journalistic objectivity...and fleshes out concerns about his own mortality in detail that's not for the squeamish.

Allen B. Weisse, M.D.Journal of the American Medical AssociationIf laughter is therapeutic, then this guide is sure to succeed, keeping all of us -- patients and physicians alike -- in stitches.

Jackie Jones BleeckerThe San Diego Union-TribuneThe definitive laugh-out-loud handbook....Hilarious. And Scary.