How’s that high blood pressure of yours? Or that arthritis to which you’re a martyr? Or your bowels which, despite my best efforts and all the gastroenterologists probing and pontificating, have never been right?

Amazingly, the answer is “fine”. Because something medically miraculous happens in the lull between Christmas and new year: all ongoing health problems vanish.

At least, they do from my perspective. Suddenly, my waiting room is devoid of dodgy blood pressures, joints and bowels. Ditto migraine, PMT, asthma and just about any long-term health issue you care to mention. Why? Simple. You’re distracted. There’s the debris of Christmas to sort, the sales to fight your way through and New Year’s Eve parties to prepare. You’re simply too busy to be ill – booking an appointment comes some way down the list, after removing red wine stains from the carpet and rustling up Nigella-esque porno-nibbles.

So lumbago goes on the back-burner and you turn a blind eye to your developing cataract. All of which, you might think, would be a welcome respite for your poor, overworked GP. Not so. Primary care abhors a vacuum. And while my surgery list is curiously lacking the old faithfuls, the lure of the waiting room proves irresistible to another group of punters. Not because the annually promised flu epidemic has suddenly materialised. No. The queue now forming outside my consulting room door wants what it’s always after at this time of year: a sickie.

After all, the late December hiatus, sandwiched between the excesses of Yuletide and Hogmanay, is viewed by most as a period of detox rather than a window of work opportunity. You’ve barely got over one hangover before you’re lining your stomach for the next – and, while you probably could just about sit at your desk imitating useful employment, there’s only so much fannying around on Facebook even the brain-dead can take. So it’s off to your GP to get your seasonal indolence disorder medically validated.

Watch out, though. We docs know your little tricks and cunning ways. We are quick to spot exaggeration. For example, there’s the patient with “back strain”. With equal measures of drama and stoicism, he declares that all movements are agony and declines to sit down during the entire consultation. Odd, given that he’s planning to spend the next few days welded to an armchair watching repeats of the Great Escape, a conclusion I’m forced into when his spasms of agony turn into skips of glee as I hand over his sick note.

Then there’s the person with a cough. Not any old cough, you understand: this individual will be “Coughing my lungs up, doctor.” Proof of this will be provided by a theatrical, tuberculous hacking performed all the way from the waiting room to my door. The finale involves dramatic hawking and retching; the implied threat being that, if I don’t cough up, then he will.

Another common ploy is for patients to describe an ailment so irresistibly seasonal that I’ll be amused or sympathetic enough to play ball. Hence, diarrhoea and vomiting, “caused by my mother-in-law’s undercooked turkey”, a perennial favourite. Or a corneal abrasion caused by cracker shrapnel. Or, on one memorable occasion, bottom burns from overlong exposure to the photocopier during the office party.

Finally, there’s the £10note brigade for patients who have been off less than a week so they are not entitled to an NHS sick note. His employer, however, will insist on a private note because he’s well known to be a malingering muppet. He pleads viral symptoms and duly pays his tenner for a private sick note. He’s such an old hand that he’s waving the dosh in my face before I've finished typing “work-shy waste of space”.

Dr Copperfield is a GP in Essex and writes for www.DoctorPortal.co.uk

Junk Medicine returns on January 12