Liam visited Your Doctors Online and chatted about health anxiety with one of our best online doctors.
“I always disliked the term’ hypochondria because it gives the idea that a person is just dramatic or attention-seeking, when in fact they have a serious mental illness.“
16-years-old boy with severe hypochondria
I am a teenager, 16- years old boy. I’ve suffered from general anxiety disorder and OCD tendencies for as long as I can remember. Still, it eventually manifested into health anxiety when I noticed lumps in different parts of my body.
Initially, I could feel them in my neck. Then they traveled to the chest and ribs, then the armpit, and finally to the scrotum. I googled my symptoms, and it said that these are mainly swollen lymph nodes due to an infection or inflammation.
I was examined and tested for infections, all the possible causes and all the tests came back clear. A few weeks later, I was scrolling on Google, and one of those awful, scaremongering articles popped up: “Blood Cancer – The Silent Killer.” It listed the main symptom of blood cancer: the enlargement of the lymph nodes. This happens because of the sudden increase in the number of lymphocytes.
I convinced myself of having leukemia or lymphoma.
Every morning, I mentally scanned my whole body, checked for any slight pain or new sensation, and checked for any lumps, bumps, or skin marks. Trust me; you will find something if you look for these things.
For the past year, I have noticed lumps all over my body, which part of me knew had probably always been there. I completely freaked out and was 100% certain I had lymphoma.
Pulling up the courage to see a Doctor
After that, I finally went to see the doctor. This was hard for me. Doctors told me that they couldn’t feel anything.
Initially, this reassured me, but a few days later, the ‘what if’ voice started to creep back in. What if they missed something? What if they weren’t feeling in the right place?
Not trusting doctors is one of the most complex parts of having health anxiety because it makes it almost impossible to feel reassured about anything.
Seeking reassurance from online doctors for health anxiety
I constantly seek reassurance from my loved ones, which can become annoying after a while. I also use the internet, but the online world is a double-edged sword for health anxiety sufferers.
On the one hand, if you google pretty much any symptom, cancer will come up as one of the possible causes. The information is always vague and not person-specific, often worsening my anxiety. On the other hand, I have also found that online communication has helped me better understand my condition.
Your Doctors Online came as a Saviour.
Finally, the internet has allowed me to contact Your Doctors Online. I found it one of the leading websites on Google for free online consultations with real doctors. In short, it is a complete website solution for everything medical-related. Downloading the app was straightforward, and you can get immediately connected with an experienced doctor.
Also Read: My Hyperthyroidism was Misdiagnosed as anxiety
I told her I have no self-control and usually spend my whole day scanning and self-checking for lumps and bumps everywhere. I openly told her that I had lymphoma or leukemia. After taking a detailed history, she convinced me it was nothing sinister like leukemia or lymphoma.
She told me that my anxiety had metamorphosed into health anxiety and reassured me that I needed to fight this. Moreover, she advised me on tips and tricks for my fear. I started following up on alternate days to update her that I was not self-checking anymore and doing much better with my health anxiety. She also prescribed me medications for pressure and therapy sessions with psychiatrists.
The online doctor chat proved that although health anxiety could interfere with your life, it’s treatable.
“The most important thing to know about health anxiety is that it’s a treatable problem,”
My follow-ups are now reduced to once a week, and I am thrilled that I overcame the hypochondria filling my life with utter despair. It happened with the help of all the doctors who were available to me 24/7. The doctor directed me towards cognitive behavioral therapy, defined mainly as self-control.
Cognitive behavioral therapy has helped people with health anxiety by aiming to help patients change their harmful thought patterns and thus change the behaviors resulting from those thoughts.
Your online doctors gave me a lot of courage to accept that it became fixated.
It would be nice to mention that my medication, therapy sessions, and empathetic online doctor chats made my health anxiety disappear. Nice doesn’t equal reality, though. There are still days when I feel my anxiety’s finger on the switch in my brain. There are days when it flips again, and I become fixated. My last fixation was bowel cancer. Do I have it? At this moment, while I’m stable, I can tell you: Of course not.
