They Don't Know What's Wrong by James Le Fanu. Robinson, £7.99, pp 316. ISBN 1 84119 305 4. Rating:

Patients expect us to be able to explain why they feel like they do and to be able attach a diagnostic label to all their symptoms, however weird and wonderful. It says something about modern medicine that patients often feel relieved at having something “legitimate” wrong with them, however awful. They have been vindicated. They are no longer time wasters, malingerers, or hypochondriacs, but “ill” and worthy of the doctor's attention.

A reader's query about unexplainable, episodic sneezing was the catalyst for James Le Fanu to allow his Daily Telegraph column to become a forum for sharing information about mysterious symptoms. Other readers (which sometimes included medical specialists) often offered a possible explanation and discussed a treatment that had worked.

This book pulls these columns together and categorises them into different body parts. Therefore the authors are really Daily Telegraph readers, who are acknowledged in eight pages at the back. The format is a query (or a few similar queries) followed by comment (occasionally attributed to medical experts but mostly anonymous). Some poor souls get no explanations at all for their symptoms, so are left to wonder why they experience pins and needles or a “Chinese burn” over their whole body. Then again, maybe they are the lucky ones. Well, if you were feeling well but had a bothersome drippy right nostril, would you expect the explanation to be that you might be leaking cerebral spinal fluid?

Evidence based medicine this is certainly not. However, this is anecdotal medicine at its best. In the absence of double blind randomised controlled trials looking at the treatment of “April bowel” and “clicking ears” (don't laugh—the symptoms, an unsettled stomach when it rains and hearing continuous loud clicks in one or both ears, are very real and disabling for some people, especially when others might think them mad), this book is a valuable resource.