One of the great things about modern technology is how it has completely upended the normal way of doing things. For example, there are reports that technology will soon replace lawyers and accountants with computers that are knowledgable enough to bill you for every millisecond they are thinking about your problems.

And, since they can think about many problems simultaneously, that means they will able to bill millions of clients for the exact same minute.

Now when you say your time is not your own you won’t sound whiny.

But just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should, as demonstrated by the medical profession, which has done the unthinkable.

It has unleashed a cure for hypochondria.

Okay, maybe not everyone’s hypochondria, but it’s sure working for me.

Lately, every doctor I’ve seen, and there have been quite a few, has given me a prescription for something I haven’t asked for.

These are, however, prescriptions for potentially serious, real-world ailments that would have developed in me if I’d thought about it first.

(Actually, they are for potentially deadly ailments, but since my psychiatrist gave me Xanex I’m unable to summon up the energy to use words such as deadly, fatal, or terminal.)

“You’ve been a great patient today,” my doctor told me at my last visit. I was insisting that the red patch down the bridge of my nose, which in the mirror was the size and shape of Key West (the red spot, not my nose), was pre-melanoma and not a sunburn.

He handed me a prescription for Lipitor.

“So I was right. Last week. That pressure I felt all over my body. My arteries are clogged.”

He punched a few keys on his new computer. It’s bigger than his old one. I’m sure he needed it to look at my entire medical history.

“Nope. Your cholesterol is within limits.”

“Tell me the truth. How much time have I got?”

“Technically, your appointment ended an hour ago.”

“I mean before my first heart attack.”

He tried to convince me that this was totally precautionary, given my age and medical history (which he insisted on calling my real medical history).

“Okay,” he finally said with what I decided was more than a trace of exasperation. “It’s because you were such a good patient today.”

That’s what the allergist said when he gave me a prescription for Flonase. He praised the way I took the news—that there was no tumor in my sinuses causing excessive mucous production—like a real grown-up. This after I brought him hard medical evidence I’d found in a Google search, right there at the top of page nineteen, that such tumors exist.

It was like the days when my family doctor handed me a lollipop after each visit (which, by the way, I’m sure was the reason for the decay that caused what no one would admit was a life-threatening abscess that led to my having that rear molar removed when I was forty-seven).

“Just how far back does my file go?” I said.

“Pretty far.”

“To when I was a kid?”

I wanted to know if he knew about the business with that same family doctor and the polio vaccine, when I ran around the doctor’s office, jumping on furniture while my father tried to catch me for the nurse. It wasn’t my fault. She was chasing me with a hypodermic needle big enough for knitting a cardigan.

I’m convinced that within a year I will no longer be sick. Instead, I’ll be on the verge of death from drug interactions.

I’m sure there’s a name for that, but I’m at the bottom of Google page ninety four and I haven’t found it.

Yet.