Hypochondriasis: A Deadly Illness

There was a stage in my life, maybe between grades 11 and 12, where I drank Med-lemon every single morning for a good year. Not because I was sick or feeling a sickness coming on, but because I did not want to get sick. My mentality was that prevention is better than cure; and my parents who love me so much and just want me to be happy would go out of their way after work and buy me a box of Med-Lemon from Clicks which would cost roughly around R70. I didn’t really even begin to consider the side effects of drinking Med-lemon, or how the ginger spice added in it would later give me a long lasting ulcer in the future. I just had this immense fear of getting sick; which turned into hypochondriasis which, thanks to the fact that my other major is psychology, is under the group of psychological disorders in which the patient experiences physical symptoms that cannot be explained by a general audiovisual condition (Hypochondriasis. …show more content…
So in essence hypochondriasis is when a person misreads their everyday physical experiences as symptoms for some deadly illness or disease. That is what happened to me, and I just revered at the thought of trips to the Pharmacy to grow my collection of Western Medicine. It had to be Western Medicine; it had to be medicine which was scientifically proven by white doctors to work, otherwise I wouldn’t trust it. It had to be the medicine I could grab off a counter with an expense tied to it or I wouldn’t believe it would work. My grandma would tell me about all of these cheaper and more natural remedies she would use in her day and all I could think was “but have they been scientifically proven to work”. And this is what my essay will be about; the fact that deep down we’ve all been