It has been stated that knowledge is everything. However, sometimes this can actually be counterproductive. For example, the so-called “medical students’ disease” (or second-year syndrome, intern’s syndrome), has been described as a condition in medical students, who perceive themselves to be experiencing the symptoms of a disease that they are studying. This syndrome is associated with an intense fear of contracting the disease in question.
An identical syndrome could potentially be ascribed to those who care for patients, and in whom on of their family members suffer a condition that requires diagnosis. Here, we describe a variant of such syndrome, for which we have coined the term Boston-Varon Syndrome (BVS).
Joseph Varon, James Boston
