Hypochondria: A new look at health anxiety

• Being concerned about having or contracting a serious illness or health problem.
• Worrying that minor symptoms or bodily sensations are a sign of a serious illness.
• Get easily alarmed about your state of health
• Having little or no reassurance from doctor visits or negative test results.
• Worrying excessively about a specific health problem or your risk of developing a health problem, because it's a trait in your family.
• A high level of distress about possible illnesses prevents you from functioning.
• Check your body repeatedly for signs of illness or disease.
• You often make doctor's appointments for reassurance - or you avoid medical care for fear of being diagnosed with a serious illness.

The patient's continual attempts to solve his problem by trying to control his own health, first develop from a series of obsessive doubts associated with his health and well-being. There follows increased self-monitoring of his symptoms and perceived physiological alteration, and then, through continual repetition of diagnostic tests, he builds up a truly phobic "certainty" that he is ill. As with many doubts, reiteration of doubt shifts it from doubt to certainty, a certainty that is even more real than "reality" (Watzlawick, 1974). At this point, the patient is trapped like a fly in a bottle, endlessly circling in smaller and smaller circles. Each failed attempt to fix the problem increases the current problem. Nowadays, patients most often search for information on the Internet or on "Dr. Google", each vague symptom described on the Internet is translated into a real certainty that they suffer from the described disease.

What fundamentally differentiates a pathophobic patient from a hypochondriac is that the pathophobic is usually obsessed with a specific form of threat to his health, the hypochondriac, on the other hand, will panic at the slightest alteration in his body, transforming the slightest pain in a sure sign of serious organic disease. The real irony is that the hypochondriac's continual struggle with the slightest feeling of illness can actually weaken their immune system to the point of becoming the architect of their own illness.

Systemicist Padraic Gibson sheds light on the treatment of hypochondria with brief systemic therapy. Padraic Gibson is a family therapist and supervisor. He works in Ireland, Italy and Malta. He is a Senior Research Associate and Lecturer at Dublin City University and Clinical Director of The OCD Clinic®.

Hypochondriasis triggers the following dysfunctional solution attempts: 

• Permanent self-control of the body. The effect of this attempt at a solution is the paradoxical effect that the patient "controls his symptoms and the fear that causes him to lose control". The person becomes prey to an obsessive fixation that causes them to control something that is not controllable and in doing so their control becomes dysfunctional and triggers the vicious cycle that builds the disorder.
• Medical consultations. This continual search for more complete and better quality diagnostic examinations with the most sophisticated technologies, initially soothing and reassuring for the patient, risks however confirming his problem, because no medical investigation is infallible or one hundred percent sure. cent, but it introduces a doubt that can only be removed by further medical examinations. And so on, in a vicious and obsessive circle.
• Talk to others. It may be good to talk about our concerns and, after all, "a problem shared is a problem halved", but this common sense wisdom does not work in a positive way for health anxiety. On the contrary, it is resolutely counterproductive, because it serves to feed the hypochondriac disorder.  

The treatment of phobias and anxiety disorders by the systemic approach is taught in the third year of the LACT course of the Clinician of the Relationship and in the clinical master of Giorgio Nardone .