An interesting insight into Health Anxiety

I've only come to realize lately that I go through flare ups of health anxiety. This produces weird symptoms and irrational thinking which then creates new weird symptoms and you you get caught in a cycle. I'm sure other members here have posted about that. For me the hardest part is realizing that there is nothing wrong and that anxiety is creating both the symptoms and the thought processes.

I listened to a very good utube article on health anxiety recently and the guy in it, a Harvard doctor, made the following points:

1) Not every symptom you have is medically explainable.
2) Not every symptom you have is medically significant.
3) Being healthy is not at all necessarily about being symptom free.

He tells a very good story about how in his first lecture on Hypochondria with the final year med students he makes an announcement at the start of the lecture that he has just been informed by the university security that a serial killer has escaped from the nearby state prison and is armed and dangerous. He says the killer has been spotted on university grounds and that security are asking students to be vigilant when walking home after lectures. He then stops for a minute and watches the look of sheer terror and fear in the students' faces in the audiences. They became agitated and petrified. After a minute he tells them that this story is not true. But he told it for 2 reasons....a) as future doctors he wants them to realise that in that 60 seconds the fear and terror that they themselves felt is what every one of their Hypochonadria patients will feel like on a daily basis b) when you have bad Health Anxiety then at both a conscious and sub-conscious level that is how you are feeling...that fear of looking around every corner for an imagined serial killer....only your brain does not know it is imagined. If you lived under this fear 24 hours a day, that you were running from a serial killer, imagine the physcial symptoms that would develop.....you would having racing heart, muscle tension, dry mouth, palpatations, bladder issues, bowel issues....your body would breakdown due to the constant fight or flight mode you are under, you would become paranoid that you are being followed, looking for evidence everywhere, believing every noise or sound was the serial killer, you would not be able to sleep, you would not be able to function normally because of the threat which so happens to be imagined. Is it any wonder then that people with Anxiety issues develop similar physical symptoms. At both a conscious and sub conscious level we are running from an imagined serial killer, our perceived illnesses every minute of every day. We are paranoid that every bodily sensation is the footsteps of the disease. We are fugivites on the run from a serial killer that our brain has invented.

Just like the med students were eventually told by the lecturer so we have to tell ourselves...

There is no serial killer following us. If your doc tells you that you are healthy then you are healthy. Stop running. There is no one lurking in the shadows. You will be fine.

Damo123 this is so true, the ghost in our mind is worse than one standing in front of us, Peace

Larry ***

Thank you very much Damo!
Really very interesting :O

I think I know this video you mentioned, a very informative one indeed :)

Thanks for posting

To see the utube videos related to my post above search for "HIC study" in utube itself. There is a series of 9 utube clips about Hypochondria under this link. You will hear the doctor talk through various items I touched upon above in these videos.

D

Thanks a lot for the information!

They really are a fantastic series of videos. Very professionally done. The 2 people they interview at the end are actually actresses standing in for 2 HA sufferers who they interviewed before the live utube event. I think they could not show the actual people for legal reasons.

I think they are reading the exact script that the actual HA sufferers spoke during the 'real' interviews.

I can't find the video on YouTube

In the youtube search bar, type "HICstudy". No space. All of the videos will pop up.