Discover your very own disease!

Do you want to be famous? Would you like to become the acknowledged expert in a whole new field of science? Then this is the page for you! Find out how you too can achieve immortality by convincing otherwise healthy people that something's wrong with them, with Dr. Dave's^* simple 3-step guide.

1. Finding a disease

The first step is to identify your new disease. This is actually much harder than it sounds, because almost every conceivable human condition has already been identified as a disease. It is a little known fact that the average apparently healthy adult human being is afflicted by over 500 different (mostly harmless) diseases at any given time.

To ensure that your disease has maximum impact in the Scientific Community and captures the imagination of the Concerned Public, it's best to choose a disease which almost anyone could be found to have. It's also worth noting that it's much easier to make up new mental health problems (cos let's face it, they're going to be a lot easier to make up than physical disorders which might need actual physical evidence to support them). So for example, a good childhood disease might be "not paying attention in class", or "being bad at spelling". Unfortunately, these are already widely accepted diseases, so we'll have to choose something else. Let's take as our example "being scared of scary things".

2. Choosing a name

The first thing to do is to convert the plain-English description of your disease into a load of politically correct, scientific-sounding mumbo jumbo. If you're planning on discovering a lot of new diseases, I would suggest you invest in a dictionary of politically correct words and phrases, as this will save you a great deal of time and effort in the long run. You also need a name for your new disease. You have a lot of freedom here: you can just describe the condition in formal language, use an unusual sounding surname and add the word "Syndrome" or "Disease", or even use plausible sounding Latin, Greek, or English to make up a whole new word. Our example then, might become "Horrophobia", which we could define as "The fear of exposure to distressing phenomena".

3. Increasing awareness

You are now ready to increase awareness of your new disease in the academic community. First you need to write a paper detailing the results of your in-depth, controlled, highly scientific study. You did do a study didn't you? Well, never mind, it's pretty quick to make one up on your computer, and the good news is it's almost certain to be accepted by some academic journal somewhere, as long as it doesn't look like it's been run through the Dyslexalizer.

Nobody's going to take you seriously unless you are a doctor and have at least a few initials after your name. If you don't actually have a doctorate, you're left with two choices: lie and pretend you have one, or buy one over the internet. I would generally recommend lying. You're not very likely to get caught out, and with the fashion for having degrees in subjects such as Food Science and Sewing Theory, it's unlikely anyone would ever suspect you anyway.

^* Dave doesn't actually have a PhD in anything, although he does claim to have a GCSE in Home Economics.