Is it difficult to diagnose hypochondriasis when symptoms are hard to confirm?
Many people who are diagnosed with hypochondriasis actually do have physical symptoms that are very real and have medical causes, even though, classically speaking, the diagnosis requires that there is no medical cause that explains their complaints. As an example, headaches are very tricky because physicians still don’t know much about the physiology of headaches. So a doctor could easily do a medical work-up and not find a specific physical reason for a person’s headaches, but that doesn’t make the headaches any less real. In situations such as this, when a medical diagnosis does not have a clear physiological cause, a diagnosis of hypochondriasis is based on the patient’s ability to accept and work with their physical diagnosis, or on their persistent healthcare-seeking behavior.
