Your GP is looking for a solution to your problem, prescribing a medication that doesn’t work, or prescribing another that doesn’t work either. He sends you to the specialist, but he can’t find the cause of what’s happening to you. Are you making it up? Are you trying to get attention? No. Surely you are somatizing your anxiety disorder.
Somatized anxiety
Emotional or mental discomfort manifests itself through certain physical aids. That is somatized anxiety, an increasingly frequent disease that is related both to the misunderstanding that derives from anxiety and to the problems that hypochondriasis entails. Living with a physical problem for which no solution can be found is not easy, neither for the person who suffers from it, nor for those close to her, nor even for the doctors who treat her.
However, we are not facing feigned illness or even the consequences of being a hypochondriac. We are simply facing somatized anxiety, where the emotional disorder manifests itself in the form of certain physical discomforts that do not disappear no matter how many treatments they receive. And if the physical ailment does not disappear, that is because the treatment has not reached its origin, which is none other than anxiety.
We can get an idea of the long medical pilgrimage that somatized anxiety entails, where no doctor finds an origin for this discomfort and where successive treatments do not show any positive results. On the other hand, the lack of medical answers to the problem will only increase anxiety.
Different ways to somatized anxiety
Somatized anxiety generally manifests itself in the form of gastrointestinal discomfort, such as nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea or even food intolerances that did not exist previously and do not respond to any treatment. Syndromes such as chronic fatigue and signs of fibromyalgia may also occur.
Pain, in all its aspects and intensities, is another of the most frequent somatizations of anxiety. Inexplicable pain that is not relieved by any treatment and that can be headaches, muscle pain, joint pain, or classic back pain.
We must also take into account other somatizations of anxiety that tend to frighten the person who suffers from them because they cannot find an explanation, such as difficulty chewing, hearing loss, amnesia, blurred vision or fainting, as well as dizziness, menstrual irregularity or muscle weakness.
