DR PHIL: My next guest, Brettania, spends countless hours on the Internet,
obsessively looking up symptoms and diagnosing herself with various
illnesses, from throat cancer
to a brain aneurysm. She's convinced herself that she has had
every disorder in the book, including MS, liver disease and a heart attack,
yet has never gone to a doctor
for diagnosis. Take a look. BRETTANIA: I wake up every day with anxiety
about the thought of being ill. I don't ever feel like I'm
fine. I always feel like there's going to be something wrong with me. I always think
to myself, 'Is today your last day?'
If I'm having symptoms, I'll go on the Internet through my phone, my laptop.
I mean, I can spend an hour to two hours looking it up. It's always at my fingertips, so I
look at any time I have spare time. I've been stopped in traffic
and looked through my phone just to get a quick question in. Two weeks ago,
itched my neck and then I felt something. I was definitely sure it was throat cancer.
I looked 'lump on side of neck.' The other morning, I woke up,
these three fingers were all, like, numb and tingling.
I panic. I told my fiance, 'This is a heart attack,' and
he's like, 'I doubt you're gonna have a heart attack.' Then, I thought that's symptoms of MS.
Also self-diagnosed myself with brain aneurysm,
brain cancer, breast cancer, liver and kidney damage,
tonsil cancer, gum cancer. Everything that's around this
area has probably had cancer in my head, at one point or another.
I can't tell if it's just the anxiety that's making it worse,
or if the actual symptom's getting worse. I don't discuss this with anyone, because
I don't want people to think, 'That girl's a lunatic,'
because I'm not. DR PHIL: Well,
I have some good news. BRETTANIA: OK. DR PHIL: You're not a lunatic. BRETTANIA: Awesome. DR PHIL: You're
not crazy, you don't have some kind of psychosis, but
what do you think when you see all of that
on tape? You're kinda watching your life encapsulated -- what do you think?
BRETTANIA: It's ridiculous, honestly. I can't even believe that I'm actually saying that,
because
I'm not sick, but when I'm by myself and stressed out, that's
when it seems real. DR PHIL: OK, so, do you consider yourself highly suggestible?
BRETTANIA: Absolutely, I can buy into that. If I --
if anything new comes out and, like, the flu season is coming around, and if it's
worse and I hear on the news of the symptoms, and its it's really bad
this year,
then I'm like 'Oh my God,' and I start being afraid of the symptoms, where I think sometimes
I actually have the symptoms.
DR PHIL: Here are the things that you've diagnose yourself with:
Brain cancer, throat cancer, oral cancer Hodgkin's lymphoma,
kidney failure, liver failure, multiple sclerosis, brain tumor, aneurysm
heart attack, ulcer, breast cancer and gum cancer.
So, if all of that were true,
your head would fall off. BRETTANIA: Yes, I know.
It sounds so silly, and that's what's frustrating is I don't
understand why
I'm so afraid of unrealistic stuff. DR PHIL: But if you really believe it,
why not go to a doctor? BRETTANIA: I just figure if I walk into a doctor's office, it's gonna
be bad news.
DR PHIL: Well, Brettania spent a lot of time at the doctor's office when she was younger,
and she actually was diagnosed with a chronic illness. Now,
Brettania's father, Kyle, had no idea this was just the beginning
of her many health issues. Take a look ... KYLE: When Brettania was about seven, she started
experiencing pains in her knee.
We were going to the doctor for close to a year before they finally were able to
diagnose what the actual problem was.
BRETTANUIA: I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and, at that age, you don't understand
the seriousness of illnesses. KYLE: She was getting so many blood tests and different treatment
plans.
It was not enjoyable to watch your daughter becoming human pincushion.
The situation was upsetting because it took much longer than what
I was anticipating. BRETTANIA: I took medication till I was about 16,
and then, around 22, I started getting pain in my back and my neck.
They tested me for a different arthritis that is called ankylosis
spondylitis, and they confirmed I had the gene. I now have a new arthritis that
will never go away.
DR PHIL: Well, I wanted some reinforcements. So, joining us to talk about people that
experience what Brettania has, who fall into the trap of this Internet-fueled
hypochondria,
also called cyberchondria, is our really good friend, Dr. Freda Lewis-
Hall. She's the Chief Medical Officer
of Pfizer, so please welcome Dr. Freda. So, you've been listening.
What do you think's going on here? -DR FREDA: Well, let me start by saying this puts me in mind
many years ago, when I was in medical school, we used to call our syndrome the
medical student syndrome.
Literally, we had everything in the book,
and I mean the book, because it was pre InterMed.
And so, it's not unusual, especially for someone
like you, Brettania, that's had a childhood history of an illness,
to be really vigilant and about all the things that are happening with your body.
The problem then becomes that you've got this vast Internet and all this information
that reinforces you, and it's never gonna tell you the good stuff,
or the easy to fix stuff or, 'Dont worry, sweetie, it's nothing,' stuff, right?
So, everything is gonna be amplified. DR PHIL: Now, Brettania's father, Kyle, is here in
the audience,
and Kyle, what worries you most
about what's going on with her? KYLE: What's real
that bothers me and scares me is the stress she goes through,
because she actually -- she's freaking out,
and so that stress level, I know can't be healthy for her.
DR PHIL: Now, is the stress level something that's kind of all the time, or do you mean when she
starts
thinking she's got a disease? KYLE: It's, well it's daily that
she think she has something, so it's on a daily basis, yeah.
DR PHIL: So, it's 'yes' to both questions. KYLE: It may not be 24 hours a day,
but when we're on the phone, it takes a good 15, 20 minutes to calm her down.
And I know she's been stressed before she calls me.
DR FREDA: I guess one of my questions, though, is whether or not you have a health care
team
that can help you sort through this. I know you went to the doctor a lot when
you were younger, but
how about now? BRETTANIA: No, no. I don't now. I have been to the doctor for
about five years maybe, when I was diagnosed with AS,
and I haven't been back since. I try to avoid it at all cost.
DR FREDA: One other things that that can be helpful to you and to other people who are
going through this is
to make sure that you have a health care team that can help you with a baseline.
So, you want to make sure that you
have a full team -- your primary care physician, specialists, if you think you
need them, a nutritionist,
you know, whatever you need. Take everything that you know about you
to them -- your medical history, all these symptoms that you have --
take it all together, in a digestible form,
and let them give you a baseline. What
would also help then is they can put a monitoring plan in place for you.
These symptoms might be related to your ankylosing spondylitis --
the lump in your neck, difficulty breathing. Those things are not uncommon,
and you can tell us about them when you see us next.
These things we might worry about. Give us a call if they happen.
These things, if they happen, call us right away.
That may help you sort through some of the things that you,
you know, that you look at. BRETTANIA: Yeah, everything I come across online, they say,
'If you experience this, go to the next urgent care
immediately,' and I'm just like, if that were the case, I'd be there every day.
You know? So ... DR PHIL: I'm a real big one
that you have to deal with things in the appropriate way.
You deal with psychological things psychologically. You deal with medical
things medically.
You deal with nutritional things nutritionally. Where you start crossing
over, sometimes, is where you get in trouble.
If you are experiencing anxiety, for example, stress and anxiety, and
your father says that you get really tense, and you said that's when you
are the worst about this. You start stressing about it.
So, you have to start dealing with what's underlying
the stress and the anxiety. You've got to pick up a skill set,
not just an anxiety pill, but a skill set,
for coping with stress in your day, managing your anxiety going forward
and doing some of the things
that will lessen that, which will make you
much less likely to go into this. And we'll talk about that in a minute.
Doc, what do you think here? DR FREDA: The idea of using the Internet, which can be very
enabling to people, it can also be, in your case, very
disabling. So, there may be some things that you can do just around these
Internet searches that would help.
So, for starters, identify a few
really trusted websites that you would start your search with.
The CDC site -- the Center for Disease Control -- to the National Institutes of
Health --
get started with those. These are credible sites that you can learn to trust.
Set some limits about how much time or how many sites you're actually gonna
search on.
You want to make sure that you say, 'I'm only gonna do three sites,'
or, 'I'm only gonna do 15 minutes.'
Then, maybe you could enlist someone to help you.
You also wanna make sure if you want information about medications that you
go to the FDA's website
or to the manufacturer's website for the most complete information.
And then, of course, last, and absolutely not least, is
you wanna make sure that even if you start with the Internet, you know stop with
the Internet.
That you make sure that you confirm these or
get objective help from someone else who knows.
So, you can start with the Internet, but don't stop there. Always, always get help.
And, of course, if you want more information on cyberchondria
or you wanna get more information and other health topics,
you can go to get healthy stay healthy dot com -- another place for
some good information. DR PHIL: Yeah, and you said something to me earlier that I thought
was
a really, really good idea, and that was
to make a list if your symptoms before you start the
search, so you don't add to it
just based on what you read. DR PHIL: And what you said is that you
do get caught up in that, so you say, 'I'm going to check for headache,' and they say,
'Well, what if you also have
blurred vision?' And you were thinking, 'Now that I think about it, I think my vision was
blurred.'
So, you wanna write down
everything that you think you have. That way, you don't get sucked into that doom
loop
of, 'Oh, yes, I have that. Oh no, and I have that, and I have that too.'
DR PHIL: What I want to do is follow
Dr. Freda's suggestions and start
putting together a health care team for you. I wanna get you
someone that will specialize in giving you
some specific skills for handling stress and anxiety.
I wanna start with that and then build on it from that point, because I think
when you
learn how to recognize, monitor and alleviate those,
things are gonna get a whole lot better. So, I'm gonna make that
just our gift to you, and we'll start with that arrangement, so ...
Dr. Freda, thank you for being here. DR FREDA: As always a pleasure, as always. Thank you.
Once again, thanks to Pfizer for taking the time to educate people about stuff
like this. For more information on today's show
you can visit doctor Phil dot com, and say the website one more time ... DR FREDA: Get
healthy stay healthy dot com.
DR PHIL: Get healthy stay healthy dot com. Two great places to go. We'll see you next
time.