Tracy Madhavan, 30, is seven months' pregnant - but she has refused all blood tests. She has also turned down opportunities to go on holiday to Singapore and Malaysia, and during a recent hospital stay she insisted on having her drugs in tablets rather than by the recommended injection. It is all because of a severe needle phobia: mention injections, she says, and she immediately starts to feel sick, her heart pounds and she feels extremely anxious.
"It started when I was bitten by a hamster when I was 10," she says. "I needed a tetanus jab and the doctor was quite rough and it really hurt. It really put me off injections - I've had a few since, although they've had to use an anaesthetic cream first. But it's got worse over the years, and in my current pregnancy I've refused all needles. The idea makes me feel sick and very anxious and nervous. I can't even watch someone else have an injection - my partner is going to have to take the baby for inoculations because I won't be able to."
Between 1 and 3% of the UK population has some kind of phobia about needles (aichmophobia) or, subtly different, injections (tryanophobia). For all of them, this week's news that injections may soon be a thing of the past must come as a welcome advance: in the not-too-distant future, apparently, we can expect to have our vaccinations, our anaesthetics and our drugs delivered through a new technique called microscission. What it will do, apparently, is use a blast of gas to open up tiny pathways through the skin through which medication can then seep via a swab.
Trials have shown that holes as tiny as a fifth of a millimetre deep can be created that reach the patient's bloodstream and deliver drugs and vaccines without causing any pain. The whole procedure would take about 20 seconds, and it is estimated that it will be available at a surgery near you in as little as five years' time.
Madhavan isn't completely convinced: she says the pain is only part of her needle phobia, and her other concern - about the idea of something being pushed into her body through a vein - would not be assuaged by microscission. But she agrees that the new technique sounds generally less invasive than a hypodermic needle, and psychologists agree that for some needlephobes, the new procedure would definitely get the thumbs-up.
But is a needle-free jab the way forward? Clearly microscission will be a huge advance for diabetics, and others who are forced to endure daily, self-administered injections: but wouldn't those who are simply needle-shy be hindered, rather than helped, by it? Isn't it preferable for phobics to find a way of facing up to, and dealing with, their anxiety rather than being given a ticket to avoidance?
According to hypnotherapist Paul Hughes, who specialises in treating people with a fear of needles or injections, more and more of us are giving in to what might in the past have been considered a minor aversion. It's a question, he says, of naming a condition and talking about it: all of a sudden more people have it. "I see about one new person each week with needle phobia," he says. "What I do is try to change their level of fear.
"None of us likes having an injection, but most of us are prepared to put up with it. What I do when I'm working with a client is try to help them in three or four stages in reducing their fear, bringing it down to what you'd call a normal level."
Gareth Sharman of Triumph Over Phobia says that, while needle phobia in itself might not seem like a very serious problem, it can have far-reaching consequences. "We get quite a lot of women with needle phobia who contact us because they realise they're putting off getting pregnant because they fear the blood tests," he says.
"And you get people who haven't been to the dentist for years and are putting up with terrible toothache, or who think they might have some sinister medical condition but can't bring themselves to go to the doctor because they know they'll be referred for tests that will almost inevitably involve needles.
"The fear is completely irrational, but it overrides everything else - the woman might really want a baby, or the man might be terrified that he's got cancer, but the phobia stops them doing anything about it."
The solution to the problem, says Sharman, is graded self-exposure. "What that means is you confront the problem in a very gradual way. Someone who's truly needle phobic would have problems even looking at a hypodermic needle, so the first stage for them might be to get a picture of one and to look at it several times a day. After a while they won't find that too difficult, and they can move on to maybe handling a syringe or to watching Casualty - people with a needle phobia will almost always avoid programmes like that for fear that they'll see an injection.
"Next we might suggest you spend an hour or so in a dentist's waiting room, just to soak up the atmosphere and to get used to the sort of place where injections are often given. Over time, gradually, you will overcome the phobia - in all cases, the phobia is worse than the event."
Needle phobia has long been a problem for the National Blood Service - many potential donors rule it out on the grounds that they are afraid of needles, although a paper presented at last week's British Psychological Society annual conference said real fear was only a significant deterrent for a minority of would-be donors. But needle concerns are taken seriously - Rakesh Vasishtha, of the National Blood Service, says care is taken so that donors do not have to see any needles, or any blood, while making their donation. And many overcome their worries out of a sense of public-spiritedness. "People come to us saying, I'm petrified of needles but I really want to do this so I'm going through with it," he says.
And guess what - in November 2002, researchers from the University of Western Australia reported in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology that they had found a good way to reduce people's fears during jabs. The astounding conclusion they reached was this: if you simply talk to the patient about something unconnected with the trauma he's currently facing (the weather, perhaps), his anxiety level goes down.
Meanwhile Dr Cathy Stannard, a consultant in pain medicine at Frenchay hospital, Bristol, agrees that there is a sense in which as a society we are less accepting of pain than we used to be, and that this in turn creates problems. "It's all to do with expectations. If your expectations are that you have this pain but that someone can do something about it, can take it away for you, then you won't deal with it so well. But if, to take an example, you're an elderly person with back pain and you accept that the back pain is part and parcel of getting older, then you're far more likely to adapt to it. Where patients get stuck with things like back pain is where they're feeling there must be a medical solution and there's something someone can do to put it right.
"The same thing goes for people being twitchy about other sorts of pain - if you are prepared and you know what to expect, and you know it's normal there will be some pain but that you'll get over it, you'll deal with it better."
The problem is, says Stannard, there's a general shift these days towards a feeling that everything can be resolved by the medical profession - pain particularly. All of which means that, in the brave new world of the future, even a pinprick will be a pain too far.