My sympathy to the correspondent's wife, but any complaint of repeated spider bites is more or less certainly misdiagnosis. Spiders rarely bite, and only when people handle them roughly. Unfortunately, people commonly reject suggestions that their symptoms, however genuine, have no connection with spiders. To compound the problem, medical staff with poor arachnid knowledge, or who lack the patience to argue, sometimes indulge the fiction, reinforcing the person's readiness to attribute every localised idiopathic skin condition to spider bites.
展开▼
