It's All In the Diagnostics

Teenage boys especially have a tendency to jiggle their legs when they've been sitting too long, as in math class or at the dinner table. The cure used to be simple. Their mothers would bark, "stop jiggling your leg." But then the pharmaceutical companies saw another opportunity to make big bucks and gave it a name, Witmaack-Ekbom Syndrome, after the geniuses who "isolated" it. Actually they didn't do any such thing, since it covers such a wide range of symptoms that it's best defined as "involuntary moving which relieves the urge to move," further clarified by the fact that once you're actually moving the urge is gone. As Dave Barry says, I'm not making this up. But let's face it, the name Witmaack-Ekbom Syndrome isn't sexy. You can't sell it in a TV ad, so they came up with RLS, or Restless Leg Symptom, which may be great marketing but doesn't help a kid in school who needs a medical excuse to get out of a trigonometry test. If he's being one hundred percent honest when the teacher asks why he's bouncing his leg he'd answer, "I'm horny," but "I'm so sorry, Miss Verplanck, I'm suffering from Witmaack-Ekbom," will at least elicit sympathy.