By Jeremy Laurance, Health Services Correspondent

There is no fear so compelling as that which is unexplained, according to Michael Whitenburgh. One woman is so terrified of buttons that she has had them removed from her clothes and replaced with Velcro fastenings.

A 60- year-old retired post office worker has not seen in the new year for 35 years because of her fear of bagpipes. “If I hear `Mull of Kintyre,` I go to pieces she said.

Both were among 1,700 people who contacted Mr Whitenburgh`s phobia clinic in Liverpool for help in just one month, prompting him to launch National Phobia Awareness Week. “We wanted people to know they don’t have to live with a phobia. We can crack them,” Mr Whitenburgh said.

A young man treated at the clinic wanted to join the navy but suffered from an irrational fear of brushes. Mr Whitenburgh, who describes himself as a psychoanalyst, traced the fear to an experience in his early teens when he had a crew cut and was teased because his hair stood up like a scrubbing brush and his ears stuck out like taxi doors.

“We’ve had a woman with a phobia of ballcocks.” Mr Whitenburgh said. “If anyone lifts the cover off a cistern, she goes into a flat spin. We’ve had people with fears of waterfalls, dwarfs, Punch and Judy, as well as the commoner ones of flying and claustrophobia.”

Some people create more serious problems, such as the games phobia suffered by a girl aged 6, who was so terrified of PE at the school that she had nightmares. After she had refused to attend games classes for a year, her headteacher said that the national curriculum was being breached and warned her parents that he might have to expel her.

Some phobias turn out to be fatal. Adeton  Adegoke, a student nurse, was terrified of dogs and fell into a canal in east London and drowned last summer trying to avoid one.

One of the most widespread phobias, however, is fear of the Channel Tunnel. “Dear old British Rail will keep me in business.” Mr Whitenburgh said.