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More frequent attention to mild physical symptoms can be learned, however, and can
become a habit. As with most things, such habitual over-attention is probably most easily
learned in childhood. It would seem reasonable, for example, that a child could get into
the habit of noticing physical symptoms more if his or her parents are always talking
about their own symptoms. We have recently found(13) that the more medical problems
the parents in the childhood home had, the more general physical symptoms adult IBS
patients report. The possible consequence of a childhood where the child grew up with
parents or others who were seriously ill, is a tendency to interpret common normal
physical sensations as symptoms of serious illness. Such a serious view of symptoms can
also be modeled after the parent's approach to common illness. Dr. Whitehead and
colleagues found in a telephone survey of 832 adults 20 years ago(14) that people whose
parents paid more attention to cold or flu symptoms in childhood were more likely to
view such symptoms as serious in adulthood and to visit doctors for them. They were also
more likely to have IBS diagnosis.

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