About one fifth of all patients visiting a doctor suffer from an anxiety disorder.
Anxiety disorders go untreated so often that we scarcely realize the trouble they cause.
Medically, they account for a significant portion of patients presenting with pain or other symptom.
My suspicion is that humans carry a predisposition to certain anxiety disorders from our evolutionary past. Those without the hyper-vigilance caused by anxiety were often the first ones eaten by a predator. Hyper-vigilance causes one to be more cautious too, so it can have a positive effect in small doses.
The downside: Hyper-vigilance associated with anxiety causes sufferers to sense greater physiological issues leading to more self-diagnosis of health problems. Ultimately, anxiety results in more doctor visits.
1 comment:
Interesting. I never thought of that before.
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