UNTREATABLE.COM
Patient chews Trident in a meeting with an open mouth, full jaw rotation, and the occasional bubble popped directly into the face of whoever is speaking. Patient is 43 years old. A director of engineering. The habit, apparently, was never corrected.
Irreversible. A teenage habit now fossilized into professional life.
Untreatable. They do not know they are doing it. Colleagues have stopped mentioning it.
Patients with Advanced Gum-Chewing Theater typically present with some or all of the following:
Advanced Gum-Chewing Theater belongs to the Institute's growing taxonomy of behaviors that real medicine has declined to name. It exists, roughly, at the intersection of internet culture, interpersonal friction, and whatever is happening in the lives of our patients. It is fictional and it is everywhere.
Under its Latin label Manducatio gummae spectaculosa, the condition appears only in the Institute's own catalog. Real clinicians do not recognize the term. They recognize the behavior.
Think you have it? Find out what else you might be suffering from at the diagnosis generator. Or browse the full index of afflictions.