“The two most beautiful words in our language are not ‘I love you!’, but ‘it is benign!’” This phrase that Woody Allen pronounced with his usual verbiage in Disassembling Harry It might have sounded like a parody in 1997, the year the film starring and directed by the filmmaker was released. But almost 30 years later, it represents more and more people, increasingly younger. “We create hypochondriacs from the cradle because we have lost common sense,” Juan Toral, a doctor specializing in family and emergency medicine, tells ICON. “Young people abuse going to the emergency room because the concept of health has been distorted. They come for consultation with any condition that is not optimal – due to having a nail bite, a cold or vomiting -, wanting to feel well in a matter of minutes. The problem is that now we don’t know how to be bad and the demands are enormous. This doesn’t happen with older people.” Toral recognizes that in a 24-hour emergency shift in a Health Center where they see between 220 and 280 patients, only a couple of them tend to be real emergencies.
Hypochondria, described by the RAE as a “condition characterized by great sensitivity of the nervous system with habitual sadness and constant and distressing concern for health”, is an anxiety disorder that is increasing and leads those who suffer from it to demand their doctors perform diagnostic tests for trivial symptoms, to search on Google for every slightest discomfort, to go on their own to specialists who should no longer self-diagnose, always believing that they are suffering from something serious. “They are patients who suffer a lot,” says Antonio Torres, a family doctor with 40 years of experience. “They always find an alteration that disturbs them: two hairs on the comb that indicate some illness, urinating less than they think is normal… Currently we need to be guaranteed that there is no damage. Trying to find an immediate explanation for what is happening to us is what has proliferated the most in consultation.”
Hence, as Torres explains, there is an abusive use of diagnostic tests when what should be done is request them only when clinical suspicion is sufficient to initiate a study. Torres acknowledges that it is common for a patient to ask for a lumbar spine many tests quickly to be sure. But what we really need is to regain trust in doctors.”
The psychologist Rafa Guerrero, director of Darwin Psychologists and professor at the Faculty of Education of the Complutense University of Madrid, attributes this rise in hypochondria to the fact that today’s society is complex. The mental health specialist explains to ICON that today we have an unpredictable life, which generates high levels of stress; There is too much information that we do not know how to manage and that is not guaranteed either; Fashionable diseases emerge that social networks discover, and with them the fear of suffering from them. “We deposit the capacity for diagnosis and evaluation on the Internet and pathologize any difficulty. Furthermore, the pace of life we lead in big cities is taking its toll on us mentally and physically,” Guerrero argues.
“We suffer from an infodemic, we access a lot of information that is not verified nor do we know where it comes from and we take it for granted, often putting it above the knowledge of a doctor with decades of experience”
According to him V Health and Life Study Prepared by Aegon Seguros, 52% of Spaniards search the internet for the symptoms they suffer from to have a diagnosis before going to the doctor. This percentage is increasing, since in 2022 it was 43.5%. Regarding age ranges, young people between 18 and 25 years old are the ones who use the Internet the most to find out about ailments. A large majority does it, 70.6% of them. While those over 65 barely use “Doctor Google” (only 33.3%). This practice, increasingly common, as the data proves, leads to the opposite: misinformation and alarmism. “We should all do critical thinking, discern and analyze where the information we are consulting comes from. The sources must be compared, we cannot believe everything we see on the Internet because it is very easily accessible information that only manages to scare. Families today are more afraid than 15 years ago because they do not know how to filter everything they receive or find on social networks and the Internet,” explains Lucía Galán Bertrand, a pediatrician with twenty years of experience known on networks as Lucía, my pediatrician.
“Google is not used well. There it is very easy to find that you have exactly what you are worried about,” Juan Toral also acknowledges. Antonio Torres agrees: “We suffer from an infodemic, we access a lot of information that is not verified nor do we know where it comes from and we consider it valid, often putting it above the knowledge of a doctor with decades of experience.” Mercedes Herrero Conde, gynecologist and sexologist, also talks about hidden interests behind much of the medical information found on the internet. “There is information that dresses up as science without being so. That’s why I always recommend answering these two questions: who says so? And what does he gain from what he says? So that we can assess whether it is someone who understands the subject or not and to be clear if it is content with a hidden advertising interest. “When something is not explained openly, it leads to distrust.”
Juan Toral perceives that we live with stress that in many cases causes symptoms in healthy people who behave as if they were sick. “I see a lot of anxiety in patients and when I started, 11 years ago, it wasn’t like that. That’s why more and more cardiac tests are being performed and antidepressants are being prescribed to twenty-somethings. We are in a circle of looking for diseases: healthy people are given the feeling that they must be controlled with tests such as analyzes that are really not necessary in most cases.” Physicians also have to deal with trendy diseases that younger patients discover on social media. “Come to a influencer on TikTok who says that, for example, he has Sibo [un sobrecrecimiento bacteriano en el intestino delgado] and explains how he discovered it and then they come to the consultation asking for those same tests.”
All the specialists consulted agree that hypochondriac people truly suffer from the symptoms they say they have and the best thing they can do as professionals is, once their emotions have been heard and validated, provide data that counteracts these unfounded fears. “It’s like vaccinating them, thanks to balanced information, against their hypochondria. Furthermore, it should be noted that they tend to be very grateful patients when they feel well cared for and accompanied,” says Dr. Herrero. “But it is true that suffering from cancer is what unleashes their fears the most. “Despite the fact that the main cause of death is cardiovascular diseases and not cancer.” Woody Allen already said it in an article that The New York Times He asked him in 2013 to talk about his own hypochondria, “the slightest symptom, for example, a cracked lip, immediately leads me to the conclusion that I must have a brain tumor, or lung cancer. On one occasion, I even thought I had mad cow disease.” And although he wrote these lines when he was already 70 years old, he had been dealing with his hypochondria and his fear of dying for decades. Something that, hypochondriac or not, every human being will have to face one day.
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