Word: dermographia
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Dates: during 1959-1959
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...husky six-footer, he was inducted, but had been in uniform only a week when he landed in Ireland Army Hospital at Fort Knox, Ky. Captain Robert L. Rainey and Lieut. Colonel David L. Deutsch found nothing wrong with him except dermographia-his skin was so sensitive that they could write on it with their fingers (TIME, Jan. 19). The doctors got him to play basketball. Within 15 minutes the patient had hives and a swollen left eye. He was released from the Army. But allergy to effort is so uncommon that goldbrickers trying to feign it will...
...Human Scratch-Pad" and dermographia [extreme sensitivity of the skin-Jan. 19]: as a long sufferer of this complaint, I thought you might be interested in knowing that it had one positive aspect for me. When I was younger, nothing quite so impressed a girl on a day at the beach as emblazoning her name on my forearm in bright, raised letters. It served to cement a number of relationships. Alas, the girls get older and wiser (and more difficult to impress), and dermographic penmanship no longer does the trick...
Some people have skins so sensitive that it is possible to write on them with a fingernail or the smoothly curved end of a paper clip. This extreme sensitivity, called dermographia ("writing on the skin") is the usual explanation when patients complain that they are "allergic to everything," two Little Rock physicians reported in the A.M.A. Journal. Although the condition has been known for years, it is often overlooked and causes a lot of needless doctoring...
...children, the skin frequently shows wheals if stroked repeatedly in the same spot, but this sensitivity usually wears off. Among adults, dermographia may occur in either sex and show up as redness and swelling around the belt or girdle line, or under shoulder straps or suspenders. Antihistamines are generally effective in controlling the reaction, say the Little Rock doctors...
There is a simple way to weed out patients who are "allergic to everything": apply two patches with equal pressure, one patch containing suspected allergen and the other inert. If the reaction is the same, the patient has dermographia...
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