Craig had tried everything with such patients, to no avail. They were generally depressed, demanding, frustrating, and time-consuming, and now with the Internet, quite creative with their professed symptoms and desire for lengthy conversations and hand-holding. In his previous practice, after ascertaining their hypochondriasis beyond a reasonable doubt, Craig would arrange to see them as infrequently as possible, mostly by shunting them off to the nurse practitioner or to the nurse or, rarely, to a subspecialist if he could get them to go, particularly to see a psychiatrist. But in Craig's current practice setup, he was limited in his ability to resort to such ruses, meaning the "problem patients" were the only bugbears of his new practice. Representing only three percent of his patient base, as reported by the accountant, they consumed more than fifteen percent of his time. Patience was the prime example. He had been seeing her at least once a week over the last eight months and, more often than not, in the evening or at night.

As Craig frequently quipped to his staff, she was trying his patience. The comment never failed to get a laugh.

"This is far different," Jordan said. "It's entirely dissimilar to her complaints last evening and morning."

"How so?" Craig asked. "Can you give me some specifics?" He wanted to be as certain as possible about what was going on with Patience, forcing himself to remember that hypochondriacs occasionally actually got sick. The problem with dealing with such patients was that they lowered one's index of suspicion. It was like the allegory of the shepherd boy crying wolf.

"The pain is in a different location."

"Okay, that's a start," Craig said. He shrugged for Leona's benefit and motioned for her to hurry. If the current problem was what he thought, he wanted to take Leona along on the house call. "How is the pain different?"