Weirdest Made-Up Medical Conditions

Talking about medical conditions can be terrifying. There's no shortage of horrible diseases you can develop, and there's plenty of disfiguring, painful ways you can suffer before dying a horrible death. We're not here to talk about those things. We're here to talk about the insane, stupid, and absurd diseases you won't believe people actually worried about, and we can guarantee you'll never develop any of them. Why? Because they're all completely fictitious, made up by people who needed to further their own agenda for reasons that are diabolical, selfish, and in one case, noble.

If you've ever bought any product that advertises it's only purpose is to make your breath fresher, then congratulations, you've bought into a made-up medical condition. Let's go back to the 1880s for this one, and the invention of Listerine. At the time, it was a prescription medication used to prevent infections from developing in wounds. If you've ever had a tooth pulled, you know how difficult it can be to keep infection out of your mouth, and it turned out Listerine was great at it. 

According to io9, that's when things started to get a bit out of hand. Listerine's owners wanted to sell more product, and that's legit. What's not legit is that they invented a disease called halitosis, and lauded their product as the cure.

Halitosis wasn't just bad breath, it was a Condition with a capital "C". The only way to fight it—and avoid any social embarrassments that went along with it—was to use some wound antiseptic in your mouth. People did, and before you laugh, remember we still do. That's marketing genius.

Let's apologize straight away, because this is going to get a little offensive. What else would you expect, though, from a condition invented to explain why a slave would want to run away from his or her master?

It was called drapetomania, and PBS says it was defined by Dr. Samuel Cartwright from the University of Louisiana. When he wrote up his 19th century profile of drapetomania, he called it "a disease of the mind" that was easily avoidable and curable if plantation owners and overseers would just treat their slaves in the way God wanted. That involved kindness...but not too much kindness, and definitely not letting them think they were equals—that was just asking for problems. Warning signs that a slave was developing a case of drapetomania included a "sulky and dissatisfied" personality, and if your slave was that, he or she was slipping into what Cartwright called "the negro consumption."

Whatever you do, he said, you probably shouldn't try to whip it out of them. Instead, treat your slave kindly, give them clothes, fuel for a fire, and allow each family their own home. He then claimed they'll "fall into that submissive state which it was intended for them to occupy in all after-time." And that all proves just because something is tradition, that doesn't make it right.

Whoever first came up with the idea of female hysteria probably had no idea that we'd be thinking this was an actual thing for somewhere around 4,000 years...give or take. According to research done by historians at the University of Cagliari in Italy, the idea seems to have started with an ancient Egyptian belief written about in 1900 BC, and it was only removed from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980. Given this massive time frame, it's not surprising there's a whole list of symptoms attributed to female hysteria, including seizures and a feeling of imminent death in ancient Egypt to possession by the Devil in the Middle Ages to the pretty loose definition of a "disturbance of function" that can't be explained by a definite, physical condition in the 19th century.

Basically, any woman who couldn't be neatly fit into society's accepted definition of how a woman should act could be called hysterical, and that's exactly how it was used. Women weren't intelligent, liberated, or their own individual person...they were sick.

Treatments varied just as much as the symptoms, and ranged from prescription herbs and exorcisms to genital massage. You might think you know where this one's going, and you're right. According to The Conversation, treatment included the development of an electrical device for exactly that sort of thing, and it became the modern vibrator. We find inspiration in the weirdest places sometimes.

What's a better way to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon than absorbed in a good book? Sure, books are great now, but in the 19th century they were the source of all kinds of medical problems—especially for women. For real. Supposedly.

There was never any real name given to the problems developed by the chronic novel-reader, but everyone from medical professionals to education advocates wrote about just what would happen to the woman who spent too much time with her nose in a book and, presumably, getting all kinds of inappropriate ideas. History Buff compiled some of the accounts, and they include things like brain and eye damage, a degeneration of the nervous system, a so-called "female depravity", moral decay, and even an early death. Most troubling to these 19th-century doctors was the idea that there was all kind of energy being putting into reading these novels...energy that would have been better off being used by the reproductive system to stay healthy and fertile.

Read too much—especially when it was something like a mystery—and you could end up with underdeveloped ovaries. Keep reading, and it'd drive your poor little female brain absolutely batty. Sure, you might lose a few IQ points reading some YA paranormal romance, but insane? That might be going a little too far.

Not all made-up medical conditions were created to sell a product or persecute an entire group of people, and when an Italian doctor named Adriano Ossicini came up with the mysteriously-named Syndrome K, he did it to save lives.

According to Quartz, it started in 1943 when the Nazis began raiding areas around Rome's Jewish Ghetto. Families started fleeing their homes, and some headed to the Fatebenefratelli Hospital (pictured) on an island in the middle of the Tiber River. Entire families were quarantined in rooms, and according to their charts, they had contracted the deadly "Syndrome K" which doctors described as being highly contagious and a bit reminiscent of tuberculosis. "Patients" were told to make sure they coughed if any official-looking men came through. No German soldier was going to open a door to a room full of highly infectious patients, which is a good thing, because if they had bothered to check, they would have found perfectly healthy families who were being hidden from the almost certain death they would have found in Nazi concentration camps.

In 2016, the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation recognized the efforts of the hospital staff and named the sanctuary the House of Life. At the ceremony were several of the doctor's Syndrome K patients, including Luciana Tedesco, who said, "I think that there was no patient in this hospital. All the people I saw were healthy. We were refugees who found a home here."

You've probably heard of wind turbine syndrome, and it's a "medical" condition that supposedly originates from—not surprisingly—wind turbines. It's championed by entire groups who are campaigning against the development of the clean, renewable energy source that is wind power, and at the top of their list of reasons why this is scary is the idea that the low-frequency sounds emitted by the turbines are going to turn your innards to jelly.

According to the experts consulted by The Atlantic, there's a whole bunch of science-y reasons that's not going to happen, and we won't get into all of them. But we will say wind turbines have been blamed for everything from blurred vision, nausea, panic attacks, insomnia, and headaches, in spite of the fact that we're exposed to constant, low-frequency sounds all the darn time. We should also mention wind turbine syndrome first came from a pretty questionable source: a pediatrician named Nina Pierpont, who (Popular Science points out) is married to an anti-wind power activist. 

Popular Science also says not only are the symptoms all pretty much a normal part of being human, they also point out just what the power of suggestion can do. What about you? Right now, do you feel a little headachy? A little bit of mild nausea that wasn't even noticeable until someone mentioned it? Did you have trouble sleeping last night? You might have a syndrome...although, probably not, unless you count humanity and it is sort of contagious.

Oh, the good old days, when social norms for women included getting married and spitting out a bunch of kids. Unfortunately, it was also the same time — the Victorian era — when those who decided not to follow the traditional route when it came to life choices weren't exactly lauded for their non-conformity.

And that's why history features a little gem called Old Maid's Insanity. According to The Suffering of Women Who Didn't Fit, this was the diagnosis often handed out to women who didn't marry or have kids — women called "unattractive old maids about from forty to forty-five" by the doctor who coined the term. 

His name was Dr. T.S. Clouston (via Sex, Sufferage and the Stage), and he was very specific about the symptoms. He believed that a single, childless woman would get to a certain point in her life, realize what she'd missed out on, and be driven insane. The biggest symptoms, he wrote, was that she would become obsessed with an inaccessible acquaintance, usually a member of the clergy, and believe the feelings were reciprocated. While he didn't entirely believe in recovery, he did say that attaching a leech to a person's... lady-parts would help relieve the depression and madness. Needless to say, we don't believe this anymore, because: progress.

It's not even necessary to go back into the darkest depths of history to find some bizarre medical diagnoses — there's one just a short hop, skip, and jump back to 1986. That, says Science Based Medicine, is when the oddly-named Dr. William Crook created a fake illness around something perfectly ordinary. That was Candida, a benign fungus found in around 90 percent of the population. Most of the time, it's harmless. When it gets out of control it can cause things like thrush but again, that's not what we're talking about.

Crook pitched the idea of Candida hypersensitivity, which was basically, well, everything. Healthline says that he had a laundry list of symptoms associated with the "disease," including infertility, anxiety, both constipation and diarrhea, weight gain, hives, and a general sort of just feeling bad. He also said that about a third of the American population suffered from this allergy to yeast, and unsurprisingly, a whole industry sprang up around creating supplements to fix the problem. 

While yeast allergies do exist, they're relatively uncommon — and they're not the same thing Crook was pitching. (He, incidentally, had his medical license put on probation.) Candida hypersensitivity was blamed for hundreds of different symptoms, and it was even claimed that cancer was a similar sort of fungus. It's not. It's definitely not.

Live fast and die young, the saying goes, and back in the 19th century, there was a name for that: neurasthenia. Here's the thinking behind it. Doctors S. Weir Mitchell and George Beard were practicing at a time when a lot of things were changing. The American Civil War had just ended, and an agricultural country was making a marked swing toward city life. That brought a whole different set of challenges to people, and at the time, it was believed the nervous system was a limited resource, and it was easily overwhelmed by all these new problems popping up for a newly industrialized country. When people spent all their "nervous energy" they became exhausted, and that? That's neurasthenia.

According to The Atlantic, symptoms included depression, anxiety, fatigue, headaches, irritability, and insomnia. Where many illnesses are caused by a virus or bacteria, this was caused by a rapidly developing change in the American lifestyle. Psychologists even nicknamed it "Americanitis," and the root of the problem was believed to be that America had quickly out-paced other countries, and their citizens just couldn't deal with the pressure.

Strangely, men who were diagnosed were often sent to the frontier to essentially be cowboys, while women were prescribed four to six weeks of bed rest. The entire idea fizzled out in the 1920s, when medical researchers confirmed that the nervous system doesn't actually work like that.

Lunacy: it's a well-known diagnosis of the Victorian era, and it was essentially the sort of madness that would get someone committed to an institution. The University of Wisconsin says there were a ton of different reasons a person — most often, a woman — could be diagnosed as a lunatic, and they were things like depression, "religious excitement," mania, dementia, overexertion, and epilepsy. 

It's also pretty well-known that when a husband or father wanted to get rid of a wife or daughter, a diagnosis of lunacy was a common way to do it. But historian Sarah Wise discovered something fascinating when she started looking through patient records (via Psychology Today): men were just as frequently dumped in those same asylums.

While men had the option to abandon wives and families and take up with another, women didn't have that — partially because of societal norms, and partially because men controlled the money. But women wanting out did have an option: have that husband committed. Not only would she be rid of him, but she'd get control of property, finances, and assets. This was, after all, a time when Evangelical beliefs preached that it was a man's responsibility to provide a safe and loving home for his family, and with just a few words to a sympathetic doctor, well, there were plenty who were happy to get a lady out of a desperate situation... whether it existed or not.

The term "nostalgia" dates back to 1688, and it's rooted in the Greek words for "homecoming" and "pain." That's pretty accurate: get a strong enough case of nostalgia, and it really can physically hurt. But it's not a disease — even though for a long time, it was thought to be exactly that.

According to The Atlantic, there are records of soldiers being discharged from military service because they came down with it — and Swiss soldiers were so susceptible that the playing of a particular traditional song was punishable... by death.

At the time nostalgia was termed a disease, it wasn't just a bit of melancholy. Other symptoms included fever, cardiac arrest, and even brain inflammation — clearly, something else was going on here. Still, treatments were harsh: in 1733, one Russian general made it clear that the first one of his men to be diagnosed would be buried alive, and did he do it? Of course he did. Treating by fear morphed into treating by shame by the time it made it to the US, and while nostalgia is still definitely a thing, it's no longer a disease that needs treatment.

In Ancient Greece, one of the most serious afflictions a woman could be diagnosed with didn't even exist. It was the idea that a womb could just up and decide to go off on a jaunt around the abdomen, colliding with other organs, pushing them out of the way, and causing all kinds of chaos. The symptoms were surprisingly well-established. If the patient complained of a sudden feeling of weakness, vertigo, and fatigue, the womb was working its way upward. If there was a feeling of choking, difficulty speaking, and — in the worst of cases — sudden death, then it was heading downwards.

Physicians believed the womb was very strongly in tune to smells, and would use scents — either inhaled or applied to the afflicted's lady-bits — to push or lure the womb back into place. But if women followed advice, it wouldn't be a problem. The key was to keep the womb occupied and busy, which meant keeping it pregnant. 

According to Wired, belief in the wandering womb lasted a long time — at least well into the 12th century. By the 15th, it didn't wander anymore, but it was still responsible for women being the irrational creatures they are... said the men in charge.