MEN, it is said, don’t go to the doctor enough. Large amounts of time and energy are spent on trying to encourage them to see their GP when they think something is wrong with them.

Whole NHS campaigns are devised to get them down to the surgery. Don’t die of ignorance; don’t die of embarrassment, they are told.

But it’s not just a man thing, because this is one woman with an allergy to going to the doctor. Hospitals are dangerous places – look at all the patients who end up dead.

Waiting rooms are not much better; if you weren’t sick before you went into one, you will certainly end up that way. The half-an-hour you hang around because the doctor is running late exposes you to germs enough to fell a moose.

When I was a student, I shared a house with a couple of medics, and they had a large group of junior-doctor friends. I know they still had their L-plates on, but my acquaintance with these consultants of the future did not exactly inspire me with confidence.

For a start, I appeared to spend more time reading their textbooks than they did. For some reason I found the British Medical Journal more interesting than reading early English novels, a pursuit which might actually have benefited my degree.

Then there were all the rumoured jolly japes with body parts nicked from the dissection lab. It was probably all folk lore, but it’s hard to place full trust in a doctor whose idea of a joke is to hide his arm up his jacket sleeve, clutch the severed hand of a mortuary corpse and offer it to passers-by to shake.

I think I am so shy of the consulting room because I’m a hypochondriac. At the first sign of illness I’m straight on t’internet, getting an in-depth analysis of the terminal illnesses from which I am certain to be suffering.

When I read for the fifteenth time that the pain in my back is, well, most likely backache, and I’m still struggling to find a web page offering a quick fix, I know exactly what the doctor is going to say, and there seems little point in dragging yourself down to the quack to be told what you already know.

I actually did go to the doctor recently, however: finding a lump has that sort of effect on you. I’d thought it was a boil at first – a sign of youth, I joked. “You were hoping it might be, were you?” he said, disarmingly.

Turned out my ‘lump’ was what he described as ‘a bit of gristle’, so what he may have lacked in chivalry, he more than made up for by putting my mind at rest.

It must be hard for doctors to stay charming in the face of the tide of humanity that sweeps through their door each day, but I’ve just found some medical slang which demonstrates how they cope.

Heard of the DBI? It’s the Dirt Bag Index, in which you multiply the number of tattoos by the number of missing teeth to work out the number of days since your patient last bathed.

Then there’s the FLK, or Funny Looking Kid, shorthand for possible genetic problems, which can be followed up by JLD (Just Like Dad) when the proud parent appears on the maternity ward.

Comfortingly, a surgeon may be known as a ‘Slasher’ and a ‘Rear Admiral’ is a proctologist; TEETH stands for: ‘Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy’ and among paediatricians, ‘parentectomy’ is a cure for many childhood complaints.

Maybe doctors aren’t so bad, after all.