skippy66
27-04-20, 13:09
I'm posting this article I wrote a while ago because the advice still stands up today and I want us all to reduce the burden on the NHS in light of the current situation. Hope it helps and I welcome feedback/questions:
About me
Hello. My name is Mike. I am not a doctor. I am a ‘normal’ human being who suffered fromsevere health anxiety for 8 years. My life was a living hell. I was trapped in the viciouscycle of health anxiety and there was no obvious way out. Then, just before I turned 30 Ifound a cure. I no longer go to the doctor every time I feel a twinge of pain anywhere. I nolonger scour the internet looking for reassurance for my symptoms. I no longer spend mostof my day obsessively checking my pulse, my blood pressure or my glucose levels (yes, Ieven did this). I have been completely free of this horrible disorder for over 3 years now,and I want to help other people break out of the vicious cycle too. I know exactly how badyou are feeling because I have been there too.
Disclaimer
I am not a medical professional, nor am I qualified to give any medical advice. Any advicegiven is based purely on my own experience of health anxiety. This guide is not intendedto be a substitute for informed medical advice or care. You should not use this informationto diagnose or treat any health problems or illnesses without consulting your doctor.
Note on the 5 steps
These 5 steps are designed to help reduce your health anxiety right now, in the short term.I have read many guides on how to reduce the symptoms of health anxiety - most of themdo not seem to have been written by people who have suffered from the conditionthemselves. This is why their steps will usually include general anxiety coping techniquessuch as slow regular breathing and relaxation. From personal experience I know that whenyou are gripped by overwhelming obsession about a particular symptom, you are not in theframe of mind to start practising good breathing technique. You want instant reassuranceabout that specific symptom that is causing you so much distress. You want to know that itis not serious and you are not going to die from it or be crippled by it.
The 5 steps I’m about to reveal to you have been developed over several years of dealingwith severe health anxiety. They are not all easy to follow and may even seem counter-intuitive, but in my experience they do work in reducing your short-term health anxiety.
STEP 1: MEDIA BLACKOUT
The internet is a fantastic resource for so many things. For a health anxiety sufferer it is avery dangerous research tool that is all too accessible. Other forms of media can also
make your health anxiety much worse in the short term. The reason for this is simple: themedia is full of bad news.
If someone has chest pain, is rushed to hospital and is sent home because the cause is‘anxiety’, it isn’t reported in the media. However if that person had died you would probablysee it in the local news. If a celebrity dies you will see pages and pages devoted to thestory in the newspapers. TV crews will be sent to the scene of the tragedy to broadcast itall over our TV screens. RIP messages will be trending on Twitter and your Facebookfriends will doubtless be mentioning it in their status updates. Speculation as to the causeof death will be rife in the early stages.
How many times have you had a ‘near miss’ in a car where you narrowly avoided a nastycollision, but were perfectly fine? Most people have experienced this. When there is anasty collision it is reported in the media - on the radio, local TV, newspapers, trafficreports. Similarly, if a plane doesn’t crash you don’t hear about it.
What you get is a distorted view of the world that is focused on bad news. Did you knowthat there is a roughly 1 in 11 million chance you will die in a plane crash? Or that 95.7% ofpeople in a plane crash survive? Think about that next time you get scared about flying.
How does this relate to my health anxiety?
Health issues are also distorted by the media. You will never see a character on TVexperience chest pain and not have a heart attack, despite the fact that the vast majority ofchest pain is not even related to the heart. According to the Oxford Journals FamilyPractice website, 82-92% of all cases of chest pain is NOT caused by cardiac disease.Anxiety itself is a common cause of chest pain.
If you are anything like I was, you will try to avoid medical TV programmes. You will watchand hear plenty of adverts on the TV and radio but the ones which stick out in yourmemory are the cancer ones, the heart charity ones, the ones which teach you how torecognise the signs of a stroke. You will scour the internet for information about yoursymptoms, and during this research you will encounter news stories of tragedies, probablyrelated to your own symptoms.
STOP!
This is typical health anxiety behaviour and it leads to a vicious cycle of reassuranceseeking. You will skip over any reassuring information until you find a story, comment orarticle which scares you more. Then you focus even more on your symptoms and thisleads to further reassurance seeking behaviour. This is why, in order to reduce your healthanxiety right now, you need to enforce a media blackout for at least 24 hours.
First things first, stop using the internet to research your symptoms. Resist the urge togoogle anything to do with health. Do not visit health forums, chat rooms or websites.Don’t go on Twitter or Facebook. If possible stop using the internet completely for at leastone whole day. You may need to use it for work - that is fine, but if this is the case changeyour homepage from a news site like AOL, the BBC or MSN to a plain search page likeGoogle or Bing. This way you will not see bad news stories.
Extend this to other media. Do not buy a newspaper or even look at the headlines in ashop. If you’re travelling in the car listen to a CD of music rather than a radio station. Don’****ch TV. Detach yourself as completely as you can from today’s news-hungry worldwhere information and ‘bad news’ is available 24/7. Go cold turkey on this for as long asyou can and you will see a short term reduction in your health anxiety.
STEP 2: START TRUSTING YOUR DOCTORS
I’ve deliberately used the plural of doctor in the title of this step because if you are like I used to be, you have seen many different doctors. One doctor tells you that yourheadache isn’t a brain tumour. You don’t believe them as they haven’t done any realtesting for a brain tumour. You may demand to see a more specialist doctor at this point toget an MRI of your brain. When your next health problem rolls around you think twiceabout sticking with the same doctor as they were dismissive of you last time (even thoughyour MRI was clear). Or, you may consider your next health problem urgent and you havephoned the doctor’s surgery for an immediate appointment - your doctor may not beavailable for a few days so you go with someone else. Either way you are seeing multipledoctors, and this is standard practice for someone with health anxiety.
N.B. There is another type of health anxiety sufferer, and this person tends to avoiddoctors at all costs because they are afraid of being diagnosed with something serious.This step applies to both types of health anxiety sufferer.
I have lost count of the number of doctors I have seen over the past 10 years. With healthanxiety you start to develop a distrust of doctors in general. What I mean by this is youdon’t believe they know much about the problem you have spent hours researching online.You may throw technical terms at them that they have never heard of. For instance I onceasked my local doctor whether I could have PSVT (paroxysmal supraventriculartachycardia). He gave me a blank expression as he had no idea what that acronym meant.
You think you know more about your illness than them but it simply isn’t true. Yourresearch is based on internet search results which we’ve already established are skewedwhen it comes to diagnosis based on symptoms. You are probably not a trained medicalprofessional. Your doctor is. Yes they vary in ‘bedside manner’ and some can be quiteabrupt and even rude if they think you are wasting their time. Nevertheless they have gonethrough years of medical training and they see hundreds of patients, giving them theexperience to know when somebody is truly ill and requires further tests.
My advice is to trust your doctor’s judgement. Give them the facts as clearly as you can,and let them do their job.
STEP 3: GRAB YOUR HEADPHONES
Everyone has good times in their lives, times when they are carefree and happy. Thistends to happen more often in our childhood when we are more ignorant and immune tothe trials and tribulations life can bring. The effect of music on the mind can be immense -most people can think of a song which reminds them of a happy time in their life and whenthey hear it, it brings those happy memories flooding back. In the same way, music can behighly beneficial for those who suffer from health anxiety.
Make a list of songs which take you back to a happy time in your life. This list could includea holiday song, a song played at your wedding, a song you used to dance to when youwere young. For immediate relief from your health anxiety, go to You Tube or Spotify andlisten to those songs. They will instantly improve your mood and put you in a better frameof mind, relieving your symptoms.
If you can’t think of any songs which you associate with a happy time, go to Google andsearch for ‘happy songs’ or ‘uplifting songs’. You will find a list of uplifting pop songs withcatchy tunes and happy, uplifting lyrics that will make you feel better when you listen tothem. If you can, put them on right now in the background while you read the rest of thisguide. You should also make a CD of these songs to play in your car, or put them on yourMP3 player or phone so you have instant access to these tunes when you’re feelingparticularly anxious about your health.
STEP 4: GET OFF THE COUCH
So far so good - if you’ve been following these steps you are probably already seeing amarked reduction in your short-term health anxiety. These steps worked for me, and myhealth anxiety was particularly severe for many years. The next step is the hardest, butprobably the most beneficial of all: getting off the couch.
In the depths of my health anxiety my wife would regularly come home from work to findme slumped on the couch, moaning about my latest affliction. Health anxiety turned meinto a virtual recluse. I didn’t want to go anywhere because I felt too ill all the time. I didn’twant to travel because of the ‘what ifs’ - what if I have a heart attack on the plane? What ifI have a panic attack on the motorway? Every time I felt a scary symptom such as chestpain, or my eyelid started twitching, or I got nauseous, I would stop what I was doing to gofor a rest. Usually the couch, sometimes I would go straight to bed in the middle of the day.I should add that I worked from home at the time and the couch was readily available, buteven at my previous office job I would go and sit in my car for as long as I could, hoping forthe terrifying symptoms to subside. It was one of the main reasons I was made redundant.
I have learnt the hard way that this kind of behaviour can only make health anxiety worse.To make it better you need to make a determined effort to get yourself active. Stop hittingthe couch every time you feel poorly. One of the best things you can do is to go for a walk.I completely understand how difficult this can seem at the time. ‘How can I go for a walkwhen my heart is constantly skipping beats?’ ‘I’m sure I’ve got a brain tumour - a walk isn’tgoing to help’. Believe me, a walk will help to reduce your health anxiety.
I have found that exercise of any kind has a few beneficial effects. First, it gets bloodpumping through your body, improving your circulation. This can actually solve problemssuch as tingling in your limbs, numbness or some breathing issues. By exercising you areoxgenating the blood and releasing endorphins which make you feel good. A fit andhealthy body is key to a fit and healthy mind. Don’t be scared of exercise - start with agentle walk and increase it if and when you feel you can. Talk to your doctor or a fitnessinstructor about devising a plan to get you back in shape.
The other thing exercise does is very important - it gives you renewed trust and confidencein your own body. Before you go for that walk you may feel like you’re about to die on thecouch. After the walk your attitude will change: ‘Even though I felt so bad, I just went for awalk and survived’. For best results, combine your exercise with music - listen to yourfavourite songs while you are walking and you will see a fast reduction in your anxiety.
STEP 5: UNDERSTAND HEALTH ANXIETY
This is the final step. If you have followed the previous steps you should already be feelingbetter. The last step is to understand that you have health anxiety - understand what it cando to your body and how it can make you feel. You need to accept that, following adoctor’s assessment that you are physically ok, your issue is a mental one. Most healthanxiety sufferers have a very hard time accepting this - it took me 8 years.
There are several good books available on health anxiety. You should try to read as manyas you can. Claire Weekes’ book ‘Help and Hope for Your Nerves’ is an excellent resource.
You are probably convinced that your symptoms must have a sinister, physical cause. It isincredibly difficult to accept that your brain can cause scary physical symptoms but this iswhere you need to get to. I went through a phase where every time I found myself in aqueue I felt dizzy. I would be fine beforehand and felt normal afterwards, but the wholetime I was standing in line I felt dizzy. This was no coincidence as it must have happened100 times over the course of a few years. The problem was that my brain had made theassociation between standing in a queue and feeling dizzy. Each time it happened itreinforced the connection. It took me a long time to realise that faulty thinking was causingthis - I wasn’t having a mini-stroke every time I stood in a queue even though it felt like thatat the time.
One way to recognise health anxiety is if you keep jumping from health problem to healthproblem every week. I would have twitching in my eye one week, tingling in my foot thenext week, pain in my kidney the next. When one symptom was particularly bothering me,the others seemed to disappear. Sometimes I would remember a symptom that had reallybothered me a few weeks earlier and think ‘where did that go?’ I think this is typical ofhealth anxiety - constantly feeling ill with some symptom or other, with symptoms comingand going from week to week.
Once you have a thorough understanding of health anxiety and how it can make you feel,you will start to get better. This combined with the previous steps can help you reduce yourhealth anxiety in a very short time.
A FINAL NOTE
I hope that these steps have helped you to reduce your short-term health anxiety. As someone who endured this in it’s most severe form for the best part of a decade I am desperate to help others like you to beat this problem. I have first hand experience of how bad it makes you feel, experience that most health professionals don’t have despite their many years of medical training. I believe it is difficult to understand health anxiety unless you’ve been there yourself.
I find myself in the unique position of having suffered from health anxiety and working outexactly what I needed to do to cure myself without resorting to anti-depressants or any kind of therapy. The steps above are, in my experience, a good way to reduce your healthanxiety short term but they do not offer a long-term cure. The secret of a long term cure isto turn round and face your symptoms, to accept them and to change your attitude towards life and illness/death. With this in mind I am writing a book on my own experience withhealth anxiety and the exact methodology I used to cure myself, in the hope that otherscan follow it and cure themselves too. In the process I hope to reduce needless doctors appointments and expensive medical tests across the world, freeing up that time and those tests to people who really need it.
Life is short, and I suffered from severe health anxiety for far too long - now I am better Iam determined to help others like you to overcome this.
About me
Hello. My name is Mike. I am not a doctor. I am a ‘normal’ human being who suffered fromsevere health anxiety for 8 years. My life was a living hell. I was trapped in the viciouscycle of health anxiety and there was no obvious way out. Then, just before I turned 30 Ifound a cure. I no longer go to the doctor every time I feel a twinge of pain anywhere. I nolonger scour the internet looking for reassurance for my symptoms. I no longer spend mostof my day obsessively checking my pulse, my blood pressure or my glucose levels (yes, Ieven did this). I have been completely free of this horrible disorder for over 3 years now,and I want to help other people break out of the vicious cycle too. I know exactly how badyou are feeling because I have been there too.
Disclaimer
I am not a medical professional, nor am I qualified to give any medical advice. Any advicegiven is based purely on my own experience of health anxiety. This guide is not intendedto be a substitute for informed medical advice or care. You should not use this informationto diagnose or treat any health problems or illnesses without consulting your doctor.
Note on the 5 steps
These 5 steps are designed to help reduce your health anxiety right now, in the short term.I have read many guides on how to reduce the symptoms of health anxiety - most of themdo not seem to have been written by people who have suffered from the conditionthemselves. This is why their steps will usually include general anxiety coping techniquessuch as slow regular breathing and relaxation. From personal experience I know that whenyou are gripped by overwhelming obsession about a particular symptom, you are not in theframe of mind to start practising good breathing technique. You want instant reassuranceabout that specific symptom that is causing you so much distress. You want to know that itis not serious and you are not going to die from it or be crippled by it.
The 5 steps I’m about to reveal to you have been developed over several years of dealingwith severe health anxiety. They are not all easy to follow and may even seem counter-intuitive, but in my experience they do work in reducing your short-term health anxiety.
STEP 1: MEDIA BLACKOUT
The internet is a fantastic resource for so many things. For a health anxiety sufferer it is avery dangerous research tool that is all too accessible. Other forms of media can also
make your health anxiety much worse in the short term. The reason for this is simple: themedia is full of bad news.
If someone has chest pain, is rushed to hospital and is sent home because the cause is‘anxiety’, it isn’t reported in the media. However if that person had died you would probablysee it in the local news. If a celebrity dies you will see pages and pages devoted to thestory in the newspapers. TV crews will be sent to the scene of the tragedy to broadcast itall over our TV screens. RIP messages will be trending on Twitter and your Facebookfriends will doubtless be mentioning it in their status updates. Speculation as to the causeof death will be rife in the early stages.
How many times have you had a ‘near miss’ in a car where you narrowly avoided a nastycollision, but were perfectly fine? Most people have experienced this. When there is anasty collision it is reported in the media - on the radio, local TV, newspapers, trafficreports. Similarly, if a plane doesn’t crash you don’t hear about it.
What you get is a distorted view of the world that is focused on bad news. Did you knowthat there is a roughly 1 in 11 million chance you will die in a plane crash? Or that 95.7% ofpeople in a plane crash survive? Think about that next time you get scared about flying.
How does this relate to my health anxiety?
Health issues are also distorted by the media. You will never see a character on TVexperience chest pain and not have a heart attack, despite the fact that the vast majority ofchest pain is not even related to the heart. According to the Oxford Journals FamilyPractice website, 82-92% of all cases of chest pain is NOT caused by cardiac disease.Anxiety itself is a common cause of chest pain.
If you are anything like I was, you will try to avoid medical TV programmes. You will watchand hear plenty of adverts on the TV and radio but the ones which stick out in yourmemory are the cancer ones, the heart charity ones, the ones which teach you how torecognise the signs of a stroke. You will scour the internet for information about yoursymptoms, and during this research you will encounter news stories of tragedies, probablyrelated to your own symptoms.
STOP!
This is typical health anxiety behaviour and it leads to a vicious cycle of reassuranceseeking. You will skip over any reassuring information until you find a story, comment orarticle which scares you more. Then you focus even more on your symptoms and thisleads to further reassurance seeking behaviour. This is why, in order to reduce your healthanxiety right now, you need to enforce a media blackout for at least 24 hours.
First things first, stop using the internet to research your symptoms. Resist the urge togoogle anything to do with health. Do not visit health forums, chat rooms or websites.Don’t go on Twitter or Facebook. If possible stop using the internet completely for at leastone whole day. You may need to use it for work - that is fine, but if this is the case changeyour homepage from a news site like AOL, the BBC or MSN to a plain search page likeGoogle or Bing. This way you will not see bad news stories.
Extend this to other media. Do not buy a newspaper or even look at the headlines in ashop. If you’re travelling in the car listen to a CD of music rather than a radio station. Don’****ch TV. Detach yourself as completely as you can from today’s news-hungry worldwhere information and ‘bad news’ is available 24/7. Go cold turkey on this for as long asyou can and you will see a short term reduction in your health anxiety.
STEP 2: START TRUSTING YOUR DOCTORS
I’ve deliberately used the plural of doctor in the title of this step because if you are like I used to be, you have seen many different doctors. One doctor tells you that yourheadache isn’t a brain tumour. You don’t believe them as they haven’t done any realtesting for a brain tumour. You may demand to see a more specialist doctor at this point toget an MRI of your brain. When your next health problem rolls around you think twiceabout sticking with the same doctor as they were dismissive of you last time (even thoughyour MRI was clear). Or, you may consider your next health problem urgent and you havephoned the doctor’s surgery for an immediate appointment - your doctor may not beavailable for a few days so you go with someone else. Either way you are seeing multipledoctors, and this is standard practice for someone with health anxiety.
N.B. There is another type of health anxiety sufferer, and this person tends to avoiddoctors at all costs because they are afraid of being diagnosed with something serious.This step applies to both types of health anxiety sufferer.
I have lost count of the number of doctors I have seen over the past 10 years. With healthanxiety you start to develop a distrust of doctors in general. What I mean by this is youdon’t believe they know much about the problem you have spent hours researching online.You may throw technical terms at them that they have never heard of. For instance I onceasked my local doctor whether I could have PSVT (paroxysmal supraventriculartachycardia). He gave me a blank expression as he had no idea what that acronym meant.
You think you know more about your illness than them but it simply isn’t true. Yourresearch is based on internet search results which we’ve already established are skewedwhen it comes to diagnosis based on symptoms. You are probably not a trained medicalprofessional. Your doctor is. Yes they vary in ‘bedside manner’ and some can be quiteabrupt and even rude if they think you are wasting their time. Nevertheless they have gonethrough years of medical training and they see hundreds of patients, giving them theexperience to know when somebody is truly ill and requires further tests.
My advice is to trust your doctor’s judgement. Give them the facts as clearly as you can,and let them do their job.
STEP 3: GRAB YOUR HEADPHONES
Everyone has good times in their lives, times when they are carefree and happy. Thistends to happen more often in our childhood when we are more ignorant and immune tothe trials and tribulations life can bring. The effect of music on the mind can be immense -most people can think of a song which reminds them of a happy time in their life and whenthey hear it, it brings those happy memories flooding back. In the same way, music can behighly beneficial for those who suffer from health anxiety.
Make a list of songs which take you back to a happy time in your life. This list could includea holiday song, a song played at your wedding, a song you used to dance to when youwere young. For immediate relief from your health anxiety, go to You Tube or Spotify andlisten to those songs. They will instantly improve your mood and put you in a better frameof mind, relieving your symptoms.
If you can’t think of any songs which you associate with a happy time, go to Google andsearch for ‘happy songs’ or ‘uplifting songs’. You will find a list of uplifting pop songs withcatchy tunes and happy, uplifting lyrics that will make you feel better when you listen tothem. If you can, put them on right now in the background while you read the rest of thisguide. You should also make a CD of these songs to play in your car, or put them on yourMP3 player or phone so you have instant access to these tunes when you’re feelingparticularly anxious about your health.
STEP 4: GET OFF THE COUCH
So far so good - if you’ve been following these steps you are probably already seeing amarked reduction in your short-term health anxiety. These steps worked for me, and myhealth anxiety was particularly severe for many years. The next step is the hardest, butprobably the most beneficial of all: getting off the couch.
In the depths of my health anxiety my wife would regularly come home from work to findme slumped on the couch, moaning about my latest affliction. Health anxiety turned meinto a virtual recluse. I didn’t want to go anywhere because I felt too ill all the time. I didn’twant to travel because of the ‘what ifs’ - what if I have a heart attack on the plane? What ifI have a panic attack on the motorway? Every time I felt a scary symptom such as chestpain, or my eyelid started twitching, or I got nauseous, I would stop what I was doing to gofor a rest. Usually the couch, sometimes I would go straight to bed in the middle of the day.I should add that I worked from home at the time and the couch was readily available, buteven at my previous office job I would go and sit in my car for as long as I could, hoping forthe terrifying symptoms to subside. It was one of the main reasons I was made redundant.
I have learnt the hard way that this kind of behaviour can only make health anxiety worse.To make it better you need to make a determined effort to get yourself active. Stop hittingthe couch every time you feel poorly. One of the best things you can do is to go for a walk.I completely understand how difficult this can seem at the time. ‘How can I go for a walkwhen my heart is constantly skipping beats?’ ‘I’m sure I’ve got a brain tumour - a walk isn’tgoing to help’. Believe me, a walk will help to reduce your health anxiety.
I have found that exercise of any kind has a few beneficial effects. First, it gets bloodpumping through your body, improving your circulation. This can actually solve problemssuch as tingling in your limbs, numbness or some breathing issues. By exercising you areoxgenating the blood and releasing endorphins which make you feel good. A fit andhealthy body is key to a fit and healthy mind. Don’t be scared of exercise - start with agentle walk and increase it if and when you feel you can. Talk to your doctor or a fitnessinstructor about devising a plan to get you back in shape.
The other thing exercise does is very important - it gives you renewed trust and confidencein your own body. Before you go for that walk you may feel like you’re about to die on thecouch. After the walk your attitude will change: ‘Even though I felt so bad, I just went for awalk and survived’. For best results, combine your exercise with music - listen to yourfavourite songs while you are walking and you will see a fast reduction in your anxiety.
STEP 5: UNDERSTAND HEALTH ANXIETY
This is the final step. If you have followed the previous steps you should already be feelingbetter. The last step is to understand that you have health anxiety - understand what it cando to your body and how it can make you feel. You need to accept that, following adoctor’s assessment that you are physically ok, your issue is a mental one. Most healthanxiety sufferers have a very hard time accepting this - it took me 8 years.
There are several good books available on health anxiety. You should try to read as manyas you can. Claire Weekes’ book ‘Help and Hope for Your Nerves’ is an excellent resource.
You are probably convinced that your symptoms must have a sinister, physical cause. It isincredibly difficult to accept that your brain can cause scary physical symptoms but this iswhere you need to get to. I went through a phase where every time I found myself in aqueue I felt dizzy. I would be fine beforehand and felt normal afterwards, but the wholetime I was standing in line I felt dizzy. This was no coincidence as it must have happened100 times over the course of a few years. The problem was that my brain had made theassociation between standing in a queue and feeling dizzy. Each time it happened itreinforced the connection. It took me a long time to realise that faulty thinking was causingthis - I wasn’t having a mini-stroke every time I stood in a queue even though it felt like thatat the time.
One way to recognise health anxiety is if you keep jumping from health problem to healthproblem every week. I would have twitching in my eye one week, tingling in my foot thenext week, pain in my kidney the next. When one symptom was particularly bothering me,the others seemed to disappear. Sometimes I would remember a symptom that had reallybothered me a few weeks earlier and think ‘where did that go?’ I think this is typical ofhealth anxiety - constantly feeling ill with some symptom or other, with symptoms comingand going from week to week.
Once you have a thorough understanding of health anxiety and how it can make you feel,you will start to get better. This combined with the previous steps can help you reduce yourhealth anxiety in a very short time.
A FINAL NOTE
I hope that these steps have helped you to reduce your short-term health anxiety. As someone who endured this in it’s most severe form for the best part of a decade I am desperate to help others like you to beat this problem. I have first hand experience of how bad it makes you feel, experience that most health professionals don’t have despite their many years of medical training. I believe it is difficult to understand health anxiety unless you’ve been there yourself.
I find myself in the unique position of having suffered from health anxiety and working outexactly what I needed to do to cure myself without resorting to anti-depressants or any kind of therapy. The steps above are, in my experience, a good way to reduce your healthanxiety short term but they do not offer a long-term cure. The secret of a long term cure isto turn round and face your symptoms, to accept them and to change your attitude towards life and illness/death. With this in mind I am writing a book on my own experience withhealth anxiety and the exact methodology I used to cure myself, in the hope that otherscan follow it and cure themselves too. In the process I hope to reduce needless doctors appointments and expensive medical tests across the world, freeing up that time and those tests to people who really need it.
Life is short, and I suffered from severe health anxiety for far too long - now I am better Iam determined to help others like you to overcome this.