MedWorm provides a medical RSS filtering service. Over 6000 RSS medical sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest medical blog items that have been tagged with 'hypochondria'. Sat, 03 Sep 2011 02:31:58 +0100 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4642857&cid=t_173704_131_f&fid=34989&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.b5media.com%2F%7Er%2Fb5media%2FGeneticsHealth%2F%7E3%2FOltDOfijMCQ%2F Twelve years ago I was in my dermatologist’s waiting room, thinking about how lucky I was. Five years before that, I had breast cancer, but was now cancer-free. I had a good job that I enjoyed and afforded me a great lifestyle. I had two children who were happy and doing well. I had many friends in my office. We went out to dinner and dancing at least once a week. I lived in the inimitable city of New Orleans in an apartment facing the bayou. I could walk across the street to City Park and surround myself with lush flowers and oak trees draped with moss. The enormous park is home to an amazing number of ducks, geese, and other colorful of species of birds and water fowl that were so domesticated they would eat from my hands. Amidst the wildlife was a first-class museum that looked li... Genetics and Health blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4642857 Mon, 28 Mar 2011 13:00:50 +0100 4642857 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4636596&cid=t_173704_131_f&fid=34989&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.b5media.com%2F%7Er%2Fb5media%2FGeneticsHealth%2F%7E3%2Fsap7Qlb_Fmc%2F Recently I was woken up during the wee hours of the morning by a sharp pain in my chest. I’m not typically prone to overreaction, but that night I sat in the dark of my room and fretted. I made a mental checklist of all the heart attack symptoms I knew. Chest pain? Holy heck, yes. Arm or back pain? No. Nausea? No. Cold sweats? No. Light-headedness? No. Shortness of breath? No. Whew. I breathed a sigh of relief. But then I started to feel a little nauseous and short of breath, too. Worry officially crept in and freaked me out. Luckily, before I started chomping on aspirin and making a trip to the ER, sanity kicked worry to the curb. I took a few deep breaths, reminded myself that mere seconds before I hadn’t had those extra symptoms and it wasn’t long before they melted away. I know I... Genetics and Health blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4636596 Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:00:45 +0100 4636596 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4450451&cid=t_173704_131_f&fid=34989&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.b5media.com%2F%7Er%2Fb5media%2FGeneticsHealth%2F%7E3%2Ftzb5ej7idGY%2F Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine featured a column, “Prescription for Fear,” that in one fell swoop dismissed WebMD as a “Big Pharma Shilling” website whose name has become a “byword among laysurfers for ‘hypochondria time suck,’” while praising the Mayo Clinic’s website as an heroic alternative, thanks to its “good medicine” and “good ideas.” The author, Virginia Heffernan, paints the “medical Web” as a landscape rife with pharmaceutical reps posing as medical experts, and posts written specifically to prey on the desperation of headache-sufferers and neurotic hypochondriacs. But not everyone sees it this way. TIME’s Maia Szalavitz, for one, isn’t convinced: “The NYT Magazine s... Genetics and Health blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4450451 Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:49:39 +0100 4450451 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4331162&cid=t_173704_131_f&fid=34989&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.b5media.com%2F%7Er%2Fb5media%2FGeneticsHealth%2F%7E3%2Fs9hb2i8g3ds%2F Healing drill spot (center) and recurring bruise (bottom of nail) You may recall that back in mid-October I had a little health scare concerning my left big toe. That is, there was a slight possibility that a bruise at the base of my toenail that had been hanging around for months was actually a melanoma. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can read the follow-up post to my toe drama.) Luckily for me, it turned out not to be an acral lentiginous melanoma (like the one that killed Bob Marley), but merely a pocket of blood that had pooled inside a small indentation. I found this out after my nice podiatrist, Dr. Bruce Lashley, manually drilled into my toenail and drained the blood. Drained blood means no more bruise which means no melanoma which means no cancer which means... Genetics and Health blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4331162 Mon, 10 Jan 2011 22:06:40 +0100 4331162 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=4086235&cid=t_173704_87_f&fid=34872&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblisstree.com%2Ffeel%2Fi-went-to-the-foot-doctor-for-a-bruise-but-it-might-be-melanoma%2F No Woman, No Cry: The offending toenail I hate to even admit that I have a podiatrist, because I’m not 85 years old. My uneasy associations with podiatry involve my obese grandmother (who lived with us when I was growing up) receiving house calls from her foot doctor so that he could clip her yellowed toenails, file down her callouses, inspect her bunions, and do whatever other unpleasantries were required of him. (I just hope the man was well-compensated.) Now I have a podiatrist, but not like Grandma did — not yet. Until this morning, I’d only ever seen mine once, back in 2007, when (okay, like Grandma) I was concerned about my bunions, which turned out to be the result of exercise — and no big deal. So what predicated today’s visit to the foot fairy? Well, ... Healthbolt blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=4086235 Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:41:25 +0100 4086235 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3444004&cid=t_173704_165_f&fid=37959&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhealthskills.wordpress.com%2F2010%2F04%2F07%2Fpain-and-health-anxiety-working-with-beliefs%2F Over the past few posts I’ve been looking at pain and health anxiety, and how anxiety about body symptoms can be misinterpreted to represent something sinister when it may be a reflection of the level of physiological arousal in the individual. In fact, one definition of anxiety is ‘over-estimating the threat’ while ‘under-estimating the resources to cope with the threat’. I really like Salkovskis statement ‘People suffer from anxiety because they think situations as more dangerous than they really are’, and ‘Treatment helps the person to consider alternative, less threatening explanations of their problem’. These explanations have to fit with past experiences of the person – and work when they’re tested out. The process of ... HealthSkills Weblog blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3444004 Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:13:41 +0100 3444004 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3429471&cid=t_173704_165_f&fid=37959&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhealthskills.wordpress.com%2F2010%2F04%2F01%2Fhealth-anxiety-chronic-pain-ways-to-work-with-worried-people%2F There are many strategies to use when working with someone who is really anxious and worried that their pain is something nasty, and becomes hypervigilant to symptoms that are actually physiological arousal, or symptoms of anxiety. The first practical thing to do is take the time to listen and understand what the person thinks his or her symptoms indicate. Sounds easy, right?  But as people with persistent pain say time and again, very few clinicians go beyond asking for a description of symptoms, and few ask about the conclusions the person has drawn from both symptoms and bits of information they’ve heard (or misheard) from the various health providers they’ve seen (or even the internet sites they’ve been on, or books they’ve read). How could you do this? One way... HealthSkills Weblog blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3429471 Thu, 01 Apr 2010 06:36:17 +0100 3429471 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3425148&cid=t_173704_165_f&fid=37959&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhealthskills.wordpress.com%2F2010%2F03%2F31%2Fhealth-anxiety-chronic-pain%2F Yesterday’s post about ‘hypochondria’ and chronic pain created a bit of a storm.  Emotions run high when you have chronic pain and someone somewhere suggests (a) that it’s ‘all in your head’   or (b) you’re just being a ‘hypochondriac’.  There are loads of reasons why both of those comments are inaccurate and unhelpful, but as I said yesterday, there is also a lot of research suggesting that health anxiety might play quite a big part in increasing the distress and disability associated with having persistent pain, and maintaining both. How would you know if you, or a patient you were seeing, was anxious about his or her health? You know I’m going to say there is no black and white answer to this one, don’t you?! Anxiety ... HealthSkills Weblog blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3425148 Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:12:49 +0100 3425148 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1298691&cid=t_173704_109_f&fid=34750&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpsychcentral.com%2Fblog%2Farchives%2F2008%2F03%2F13%2Fsupport%2F “Ma has made herself sick with her hypochondria, like actually sick on the inside of her body. And even if that’s not true, being a hypochondriac is at the very least an illness in itself, a mental illness. Which is worse than having a kidney infection or a gallstone ’cause it can go on forever, and in the process you lose all your friends for being crazy.” - Michelle Tea, in her fantastic frenzied novel Rose of No Man’s Land. So true. In contrast, here’s a gaggingly idealistic portrayal of another world. Comforting supportive friends helping out in PSAs from SAMHSA: What a Difference a Friend Makes. Yes, what. (Source: World of Psychology) World of Psychology blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1298691 Thu, 13 Mar 2008 06:36:47 +0100 1298691