UNTREATABLE.COM
Patient sips their 64oz hydration jug every 2 minutes throughout their workout. Has, in the last hour, consumed 94 ounces of electrolyte-enhanced water. Has urinated three times. Has now refilled the jug. Views dehydration as the most pressing risk to their lifting career. Has never been dehydrated.
Chronic. The jug follows them to the bathroom.
None. The electrolyte packets cost $3 each.
Patients with Chronic Hydration Panic typically present with some or all of the following:
Chronic Hydration Panic 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 Timor dehydrationis eterna, 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.