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Article: Hypochondriacs have real disease: `health anxiety'.
- Article from:
- Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
- Article date:
- June 11, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Julia Sommerfeld
SEATTLE _ Doctors' waiting rooms are full of them. The fellow with a dry cough who is convinced it's SARS. The woman who thinks her new freckle is melanoma. The patient who is sure his headache is a telltale sign of brain cancer.
Immune to assurances otherwise, they vex physicians, rack up health-care costs with unnecessary tests and exasperate those closest to them with their incessant aches and pains.
In fact, they do have a medical condition _ just not the ones they think they have.
Physicians used to call them hypochondriacs, but the term has taken on the negative connotations of whiners and malingerers.
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