skippy66
16-08-13, 16:52
Having suffered from severe health anxiety for 8 years I know how to spot the symptoms. Some of them are more obvious than others, and it can be very difficult to accept that your real physical symptoms are caused by your mind.
Always researching symptoms online
This has led to the creation of the term ‘cyberchondria’ – the act of obsessively searching for self-diagnosis online. I used to do this all the time. Every day, for hours a day I would google any symptom I had:
chest pain
muscle twitching causes
cause of tiredness
why is my eyelid twitching?
left arm ache
can stress cause PVCs?
is stiff neck meningitis?
Having access to Google is like having a doctor on call 24/7. The problem is that Dr Google is a terrible doctor. He can’t see you to physically evaluate you, he can’t speak to you to ask you questions and he always jumps to the worst possible causes first.
If you find yourself constantly researching your symptoms online then you probably have health anxiety. Stop doing it.
Jumping from one symptom to the next
When my health anxiety was bad I had hundreds of symptoms, most of which I assumed were caused by some deadly disease. I would lurch from one symptom to the next though, and the previous one would disappear when the new one took hold. For instance, one week I would obsess over an ache in my left arm. I was convinced it was the sign of an impending heart attack. The next week, my right eyelid starting twitching whenever I touched it – definitely MS or a brain tumour I thought. In my panic over the eyelid twitching I would forget that my left arm had stopped aching and so probably wasn’t related to an impending heart attack.
Any time I had a stomach upset I thought it might be esophageal cancer. The fact my symptoms came and went was irrelevant to me, though looking back I should have realised that everyone gets stomach problems from time to time and that cancer would probably not have caused intermittent symptoms.
If you find that you’re getting loads of different symptoms that come and go, to the extent that if you book a doctor’s appointment you wouldn’t know where to start, then you probably have health anxiety.
Starting to distrust doctors
Due to the vast amount of internet research I quickly started to believe that I was more knowledgeable than my doctors. I say doctors plural because I regularly switched for 2nd, 3rd, 4th opinions and my guess is that you do that too. A doctor says you’re ok but you don’t believe them. You go and find out from the internet what tests you need to diagnose the serious illness you think you must have – if your doctor hasn’t ordered it then you believe he doesn’t know what he is doing. It’s not just general practitioners either – I started to distrust cardiologists when they kept saying my heart palpitations were benign. I distrusted a neurosurgeon when he said my muscle twitching was benign because he didn’t immediately order an MRI. If you have health anxiety you probably have a hard time trusting doctors.
Never being fully reassured
Ok, so you have the tests required to rule out serious disease, and the doctors say you’re fine. But then you still get symptoms, so not only do you start to distrust the doctors, you start to question the validity of the tests. That endoscopy – did they really do a proper biopsy? That blood test – can it really rule out AS? That brain MRI – can it really rule out an aneurysm or do I need one where they inject dye into my veins???
…and so on.
The worst thing I used to do was to Google ‘false negative [insert medical test here]‘. This blows any reassurance out of the water immediately because there is ALWAYS one case of misdiagnosis, and the person with health anxiety is convinced it’s them too.
If you have health anxiety you are locked in a perpetual loop of reassurance-seeking and then having that reassurance evaporate over time. To beat health anxiety you need to break the cycle.
Avoiding medical TV shows
I saw 5 minutes of an episode of ‘House’. A guy collapsed at the altar on his wedding day with a heart problem. As a result I never watched House again. I would avoid all programmes vaguely health-related. Even if a non-specific programme featured some kind of medical catastrophe it would throw me into a panic. If someone died from natural causes in a movie it would give me a panic attack in the cinema or at home. I once watched a TV drama where a character suffered a brain haemorrhage and I ended up calling an ambulance such was the strength of the panic attack that followed.
The fact is that you will never be able to avoid medical stuff on TV or in other media, so the best long term solution is to gradually expose yourself to it. This is what I did and now these shows don’t bother me anymore.
Are there any I've missed?
Always researching symptoms online
This has led to the creation of the term ‘cyberchondria’ – the act of obsessively searching for self-diagnosis online. I used to do this all the time. Every day, for hours a day I would google any symptom I had:
chest pain
muscle twitching causes
cause of tiredness
why is my eyelid twitching?
left arm ache
can stress cause PVCs?
is stiff neck meningitis?
Having access to Google is like having a doctor on call 24/7. The problem is that Dr Google is a terrible doctor. He can’t see you to physically evaluate you, he can’t speak to you to ask you questions and he always jumps to the worst possible causes first.
If you find yourself constantly researching your symptoms online then you probably have health anxiety. Stop doing it.
Jumping from one symptom to the next
When my health anxiety was bad I had hundreds of symptoms, most of which I assumed were caused by some deadly disease. I would lurch from one symptom to the next though, and the previous one would disappear when the new one took hold. For instance, one week I would obsess over an ache in my left arm. I was convinced it was the sign of an impending heart attack. The next week, my right eyelid starting twitching whenever I touched it – definitely MS or a brain tumour I thought. In my panic over the eyelid twitching I would forget that my left arm had stopped aching and so probably wasn’t related to an impending heart attack.
Any time I had a stomach upset I thought it might be esophageal cancer. The fact my symptoms came and went was irrelevant to me, though looking back I should have realised that everyone gets stomach problems from time to time and that cancer would probably not have caused intermittent symptoms.
If you find that you’re getting loads of different symptoms that come and go, to the extent that if you book a doctor’s appointment you wouldn’t know where to start, then you probably have health anxiety.
Starting to distrust doctors
Due to the vast amount of internet research I quickly started to believe that I was more knowledgeable than my doctors. I say doctors plural because I regularly switched for 2nd, 3rd, 4th opinions and my guess is that you do that too. A doctor says you’re ok but you don’t believe them. You go and find out from the internet what tests you need to diagnose the serious illness you think you must have – if your doctor hasn’t ordered it then you believe he doesn’t know what he is doing. It’s not just general practitioners either – I started to distrust cardiologists when they kept saying my heart palpitations were benign. I distrusted a neurosurgeon when he said my muscle twitching was benign because he didn’t immediately order an MRI. If you have health anxiety you probably have a hard time trusting doctors.
Never being fully reassured
Ok, so you have the tests required to rule out serious disease, and the doctors say you’re fine. But then you still get symptoms, so not only do you start to distrust the doctors, you start to question the validity of the tests. That endoscopy – did they really do a proper biopsy? That blood test – can it really rule out AS? That brain MRI – can it really rule out an aneurysm or do I need one where they inject dye into my veins???
…and so on.
The worst thing I used to do was to Google ‘false negative [insert medical test here]‘. This blows any reassurance out of the water immediately because there is ALWAYS one case of misdiagnosis, and the person with health anxiety is convinced it’s them too.
If you have health anxiety you are locked in a perpetual loop of reassurance-seeking and then having that reassurance evaporate over time. To beat health anxiety you need to break the cycle.
Avoiding medical TV shows
I saw 5 minutes of an episode of ‘House’. A guy collapsed at the altar on his wedding day with a heart problem. As a result I never watched House again. I would avoid all programmes vaguely health-related. Even if a non-specific programme featured some kind of medical catastrophe it would throw me into a panic. If someone died from natural causes in a movie it would give me a panic attack in the cinema or at home. I once watched a TV drama where a character suffered a brain haemorrhage and I ended up calling an ambulance such was the strength of the panic attack that followed.
The fact is that you will never be able to avoid medical stuff on TV or in other media, so the best long term solution is to gradually expose yourself to it. This is what I did and now these shows don’t bother me anymore.
Are there any I've missed?