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Health scares are almost a religion for the media - but this summer we are in danger of overdosing.

It began as a rash, a summer virus of a familiar kind, but by yesterday morning had become an epidemic, leading readers to fear for their sanity. Within the pages of a single British newspaper, it was reported that pensioners risk sexually transmitted infections because of their energetic bedhopping; that daily exposure to the sun may help to prevent cancer; that so-called good cholesterol might actually increase the risk of heart attacks; and that permitting nurses to write prescriptions is putting patients at risk.

But, although the Daily Mail has it worse than most, it is not an isolated case. Elsewhere in yesterday's news were reports that yoghurt may kill you, as may "weekend mini-breaks", while noisy neighbours can bring on cardiac arrest, potentially fatal insect bites are increasing in Britain - and making children wait to use the loo on motorway trips might make them susceptible to urinary infections. On the positive side, zebrafish might cure skin cancer.

Virulent as ebola, this outbreak of medical fear is partly explained by the conditions of journalism. The reports on which the fear pieces are based are generally published in medical journals, where they're offered for sober peer review. Such a process will acknowledge that bodies are unpredictable and still often unknowable, and the pill that cures one patient can kill another. This means that medical research, rather like law, becomes an adversarial system, proposition and counter-claim alternating. So, a week after one lot of doctors say that sunbathing will give us all skin cancer, another laboratory asserts that a tan may protect against colon carcinoma.

However newspaper reporting, a broad-brush form, tends to present the headline findings without statistical balance - how many grannies actually have the clap? What proportion of UK funerals is caused by the stress of the neighbours turning up the radio, or by taking a few days in Amsterdam? This approach has not changed, but what is new this summer is the increase in space for tabloid quackery because of a general decision to give Gordon Brown a period of quarantine from the kind of anti-government coverage that has filled front pages for years. Blair scare has been replaced by health scare.

A deeper explanation, though, is psychological or anthropological. By interesting coincidence, Channel 4 this week screened a remarkable film by Richard Dawkins in which he examined the paradox that, though homeopathy and other alternative medical therapies are scientifically ridiculous, they are successful for a significant number of patients. His conclusion was that, though homeopathic treatments consist of water and a speck of something else, they work because the practitioners of the art are generally kind, gentle people who offer a length and intensity of care impossible for GPs. What alternative medicine is offering is that old parental medicine: TLC.

In the film, Dawkins didn't link this with his other area of investigation - the durability of organised religion - but there surely is a connection. Alongside the "selfish gene" best-sellingly identified by Dawkins, there seems to be a "fear gene" or "lonely gene" that predisposes people to respond to kindness and reassurance, even to the extent of reversing illness and injury.

The cliched idea of doctors playing God here takes on a new meaning. What the writer Anthony Burgess called the "God-shaped hole" that many humans feel the need to fill can also present itself as a doctor-sized gap and, in a world becoming more generally secular outside pockets of religious intensity, is perhaps more likely to do so. Just as religious doctrine can make life more tolerable by offering scientifically unverifiable promises that bring psychological benefits, so does alternative medicine.

But the extent to which health has become a displacement religion - a desire for a spotless body replacing that for a pure soul - is shown by the daily diet of scare stories in the papers. In most religions, the hope of the faithful is encouraged by fear of what may happen if they fail to comply. The media, with burning sermons every day, including Sunday - warning that what you've got in your fridge or your genes may finish you off - are the Book of Apocalypse of the Church of the Latter-Day Quacks; the medical correspondents and headline writers its high priests.

This matters because worship of the god of the body has consequences. These may not be as serious as the perversions of organised religion - jihad, murdered abortion doctors - but they still matter.

The worst that can happen from the reports of octogenarians with gonorrhoea is longer queues in Boots as arthritic fingers fumble out the change for a packet of three. Other sermons, though, have potentially fatal consequences. The bewilderingly conflicting pieces on the mechanics of blood pressure and cholesterol may convince patients to abandon medication. The injunction to let children pee whenever they need could lead scores of cars to pull on to the hard shoulder where, road statistics show, they face much greater risks than urinary infection.

The biggest medical risk, though, is reading a summer newspaper, in the car or anywhere else. That can really make you sick.