Psychiatric disorders are not cured- rather, they are treated and the focus is on symptom reduction and functional improvement, given that the exact causes as unknown. Hypochondria, also known as health anxiety and illness anxiety disorder, can be treated by instituting CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and regular visits with your family doctor to ensure you are physically healthy.
So when you utilize CBT, you address your thoughts and behaviors which are contributing to you health anxiety. So lets say you have stomach pain. You may have thoughts that this is cancer, and that you may die from this. In addition, you have the thoughts that you can't stand not knowing what this is. As a result, anxiety set in, and you engage in behaviors which serve to decrease the anxiety over the short term.
So you engage in behaviors to reduce the anxiety and uncertainty, such as over-checking your body, over-monitoring your body, over-researching your possible ailments (online, library), multiple visits to your doctor, and multiple medical tests. The problem is that you don't have any physical illness, but the more you are 'normal,' the more you search for the elusive physical illness that you are certain you have.
However, these behaviors only serve to increase your anxiety and maintain it, as your behaviors only feed your intolerance of uncertainty. The paradox here is the more the doctors and medical tests say you are normal, the more that you think you have an illness. The reality is that you do have an illness, but it is not physical- rather, it is mental and psychological, and you need help in other ways, such as provided in the self-help book Anxiety Protocol.
