Potter fans suffering 'Hogwarts headaches'
It may be the book that got a new generation reading but the huge Harry Potter tomes are giving some children headaches, a doctor said today.
Dr Howard J Bennett, of George Washington University Medical Centre, has recently diagnosed “Hogwarts headaches” in three young patients.
One of the youngsters also suffered neck and wrist pain after lying down for many hours reading JK Rowling’s latest offering, he said.
In a letter to the New England Medical Journal, the doctor wrote: “During the past several months, I have evaluated three children between eight and 10 years of age who presented with a two- to three-day history of generalised headaches.
“In each case, the headache was dull and the pain fluctuated throughout the day. One patient also reported neck and wrist pain.”
The children did not have a history of such symptoms and the only connection appeared to be that all were reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the time.
“Two patients read the book lying prone, and the third propped the book on her legs and rested her head on a pillow,” wrote Dr Bennett, of Washington, DC.
He said he diagnosed “tension headache brought on by the effort required to plough through an 870-page book”.
But the children were so absorbed in the book that instead of stopping reading they took painkillers and carried on.
“In all cases, the pain resolved one to two days after the patient had finished the book,” Dr Bennett wrote.
He added: “It is worth noting that I did not witness this phenomenon with any of the previous Harry Potter tomes and that each of Rowling’s successive books has been bigger than the last.
“If this escalation continues as Rowling concludes the saga, there may be an epidemic of Hogwarts headaches in the years to come.”
