Munchhausen's syndrome - what is it?

Munchausen's syndrome was first described in 1951 in the UK. This disorder is currently of great interest to researchers and psychiatrists around the world due to its enormous complexity and diversity, depending on what the patient thinks up the patient. Moreover, pathologies simulated by patients can be both surgical and therapeutic, and sometimes patients can "require" emergency care.

Often such patients wander from one medical institution to another for a long time in search of a surgical intervention for a "cure." Characteristically, descriptions of symptoms that patients give almost always differ from real complaints by improbability, excessive dramatization. Sometimes stories can be similar to those legends that the famous literary hero Baron Munchausen told, which was the reason for this unusual name of the disease. Often, Munchausen's syndrome is termed hospital addiction, occupational sickness syndrome, frequent hospital syndrome, and so on.

When entering the admissions department, patients describe their complaints to the receiving doctors as threatening their lives, they complain of acute pain in the abdomen, loss of consciousness, bleeding, and huge blood loss. In addition, described and such conditions that in real life can not be met, but they are necessarily a threat to the life of the patient. This almost always makes it possible to determine that this is just a simulation of diseases.

Often , Munchausen's disease occurs to those doctors who are on duty in the hospital in the evening. Most likely, this is due to the fact that patients are inclined to think that only young inexperienced specialists remain on duty at this time, who can easily overlook the inconsistencies in the stories of the simulator.

At admission, he usually immediately begins to insist on surgery, trying to show the doctor how bad he is, and how difficult his "disease" is. Usually it is possible to determine that the patient has Munchhausen's syndrome, it is already possible when examining a place where, in his words, pain is localized. Often in this place there are many traces from surgical interventions. It is interesting that after hearing the doctor's refusal to carry out the operation, the patients do not remain in the hospital, as the doctor requires in accordance with their "condition", but simply leave to address the same complaints to another hospital.

However, not always Munchausen's syndrome manifests itself in the desire to undergo surgical interventions. Often the patient's motive may be getting shelter at night, flight from the police, getting painkillers (drugs). In accordance with this and with what disease the patient tries to feign, several types of disorder are distinguished. However, for all people with Munchausen's syndrome, the inability to establish connections with other people is characteristic, which is the reason for their loneliness, pathological deceit, hypochondriacism. Often such patients, having got in a hospital, start to influence other patients being there, using for this purpose their knowledge in medicine. Of course, this is a big problem for doctors, because by that the patient with Munchausen syndrome aggravates the course of other people's diseases.