It’s understandable to feel a little nervous about upcoming medical procedures but if these fears are extreme enough to prevent someone from getting necessary medical attention it could seriously damage their health. Undealt with these fears could potentially result in death.
Tomophobia is a social phobia of medical procedures while medical fears are defined as fears of any experience involving medical procedure or personnel while evaluating or modifying a person’s health status in a traditional health care setting. These fears can include fears for medical equipment such as syringes and needles.
Symptoms
Symptoms of these fears are described as heart palpitations, nausea, chest pain, difficulty with breathing or rapid breathing, dizziness, weakness, perspiration, feeling faint, dry mouth and throat, blurry vision, impaired hearing and shivering.
Causes
As with all fears, there is no comprehensive specific cause for a fear of medical procedures. The cause of these fears will vary from person to person based on their individual experience in life. There is no known extraneous cause for these conditions.
Treatment
Treating this condition is relatively easy with hypnotherapy. Experiencing medical fear is a learned behaviour. Hypnotherapy recognises that no-one is born with a fear of medical procedures and the cause for everyone will be specific to each client.
Hypnotherapy strives to help each individual client understand the specific cause for their medical fear. Understanding the cause of the fear alone often eases the condition. Once understood the fear needs to be resolved. This is a learning experience and as easy as it is to create a fear, it’s as easy to resolve it. Hypnotherapy is essentially a method for learning rapidly!