Sir, I have read with interest the articles, Study of Perceived Stress among Female Medical and Non-Medical University Students in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, by Dabal et al.1 and the accompanying Editorial by Al-Lamki.2 I would like to congratulate the authors for their scholarship and for highlighting this issue empirically. The study authors have compared levels of stress among medical students using certain defined parameters. The study suggested that medical students appear to have a greater propensity towards academic stress, than their counterpart nonmedical students.1 Studies from different parts of the world, including from the Arabian Gulf are congruent with such a view.3,4 However, compared to other studies, the present finding of a 48.6% rate of academic stress appear to be bewilderingly high considering that, due to cultural patterning, there is a low tendency in such a population to admit to emotional distress.5 The ensuing paragraphs ponder about some of the methodological and conceptual factors that could contribute to what could amount to a spurious rate of academic stress. First, the high incidence could be partly explained due the phenomena know as ‘hypochondriasis of medical students’. Medical students are likely to perceive themselves as distressed partly because they are familiar with many of the ill-effects of stress from their medical education. These are the people who are exposed to such concepts and terminologies routinely in their medical education. Relevant to this, there is a lot of hype, in the media as well as in the medical profession, that medical schools are ‘hard’. This, of course, is likely to create the climate of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This, in turn, may lead to the dire consequence of endorsing stress that is not really there. Second, the contribution of one’s personality to academic stress has often been overlooked in current discussion on academic stress. It is well known that certain personality types are prone to stress and in this context, it is the so called ‘Type-A personality’.6 There is empirical evidence to suggest that medical professions tends to attract people with ‘Type-A’ personalities, known to be marked by competitiveness, machiavellianism and envy as well as characterised by the cardinal temperaments that are prone to ‘burn- out’, or in the present context, to suffering from academic stress. Equally, there is an indication that medical teachers are not spared from having such a disposition. This echoes the dictum, ‘birds of a feather flock together”. Third, another point of contention that has been overlooked in this study is the particular role of the medical teacher in this region. Gulf countries tend to attract medical teachers from different parts of the world, but predominantly from other developing countries. Such medical teachers, ambitious as they may be to distinguish themselves in an international setting, are known to have come here because they are unable to thrive elsewhere in competitive academic medicine. Such ‘substandard’ teachers, it could be speculated here, are likely to be ill-equipped to provide an effective learning environment for their students. One salient SQU Med J, December 2010, Vol. 10, Iss. 3, pp. 410-411, Epub. 14th Nov 10 Received 9th Sep 10 <ÌÈ◊“