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Is health anxiety on the increase? This mornings Guardian looks at the condition where patients seek constant reassurance from their GPs that there’s nothing wrong with them
Health anxiety is characterized by the excessive seeking of reassurance, from doctors or from family members. “What we always tell people on our helpline is that reassurance doesn’t work,” says O’Neill. “I have seen people who have convinced themselves they have a brain tumour – they go to their GP, they go for scans. When they are reassured they don’t have a tumor, they still think what if they missed it? What if it was too small to see? What if this is one of those NHS mistakes? Because the media highlights it so much when things do go wrong, it feeds the feeling in people with health anxiety that ‘I could be the one that it goes wrong for’. People ring up and ask, ‘Do you think I’ve got cancer?’ I can’t offer that reassurance because how would I know? But we do know that reassurance only works in the short term. It isn’t long before those fears return.” link to continue reading
Source: Guardian
