A Nation of Hypochondriacs The main impression growing out of twelve years on the faculty of a medical school is that the No. 1 health problem in the U. S. today, even more than AIDS or cancer, is that Americans don" t know how to think about health and illness. Our reactions are formed on the terror level. We fear the worst, expect the worst and invite the worst. The result is that we are becoming a nation of weaklings and hypochondriacs, a self-medicating society incapable of distinguishing between casual , everyday symptoms and those that require professional attention. Somewhere in our early education we become addicted to the notion that pain means sickness. We fail to learn that pain is the body" s way of informing the mind that we are doing something wrong, not necessarily that something is wrong. We don" t understand that pain may be telling us that we are eating too much or the wrong things; or that we are smoking too much or drinking too much; or that there is too much emotional congestion in our lives; or that we are being worn down by having to cope daily with overcrowded streets and highways, the pounding noise of garbage grinders , or the cosmic distance between the entrance to the airport and the departure gate. We get the message of pain all wrong. Instead of addressing ourselves to the cause, we become pushovers for pills, driving the pain underground and inviting it to return with increased authority.