Can it be hypochondria a symptom of a intensive medical culture of a country?

  No! I am not here to tell you to don't see a doctor or look for a diagnosis when you feel a symptom. But I am here to create a hypothesis and I am totally open to receiving a "you are totally crazy" or "you are high on drugs". If you read my posts you know that I am from Brazil, and I have been living in Canada for almost 6 years. The two countries have lots of differences when we are talking about health management.

  Brazil is a country that has a public health system, however, since it doesn't pay well for physicians and other health providers, when they start to get experience they usually leave the public system and open a private office. Public health has fewer investments than private health in there so it is normal to see people with a social class above poverty paying health insurance plans to be able to cover good hospitals when needed or exams of all kinds, from blood exams to images. It is normal in the country for a person to start doing exams since early childhood, blood exams even with no signs of diseases.

  In Canada, the health system is more than 95% public, a little bit different from the public health system in Brazil, because there are third-party companies that receive funds from the government, but you can't pay for a doctor to check up you in most of the times. The only exception is for some image exams, such as MRI. Sometimes the queue for a public MRI is about months, so there are some private image clinics where you pay and you can do it quicker. Consequently, you have a policy of only prescribing exams if the doctors see it as a need. So it is very difficult to perform preventive image exams like sometimes you do in Brazil. In Brazil, it is normal to have a prescribed yearly abdominal ultrasound for example even if you don't have any symptoms.

https://pixabay.com/illustrations/pills-medicine-prescription-3673645/

  Going back to the subject, what is the effect of this type of health policies and management? I know many people that go crazy if they don't perform their yearly blood/image exams! For example, I know a person who is around her 30s, she has an aunt that died of colorectal cancer, and she has convinced that she needs to perform a gastric endoscopy every year, even without any symptoms. If we argue that maybe it isn't so necessary, maybe she would need to see another doctor to take another opinion, she counters the attack.

  Another example is another lady who moved to Canada from Brazi, who is also around her 30s, and has been feeling nausea, gases, and abdominal pain sometimes. She passed through some diagnosis processes in here, with blood exams and even gastric endoscopy which pointed out nothing important, so she was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Which is generally an exclusion diagnosis, since no one knows much about the biology of this syndrome. However, she talked with some people from Brazil that convinced her that she needs a colonoscopy! And now she is convinced that she needs that! Colonoscopy is a very invasive exam to check the intestines, usually, it isn't an exam that is passed every time.

  I mentioned two examples, but there are more. I know that we live in an era in which anxiety has an outbreak, and people suffer a lot in their work or how to maintain their houses in economic crisis, which is also influencing.

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https://pixabay.com/photos/blood-pressure-clinic-desktop-work-3524615/

  Hypochondria is when people focus a lot on diseases or symptoms, this hyper-focusing is very damaging when the person only talks about it or lives around this focus. So the person can't live their lives without a minute without thinking that she can with a serious disease. It can also trigger another bad behavior, self-medication. In countries like Brazil, it is easier to self-medicate, but there is still poor control over medications and the necessity of prescriptions. Only antibiotics, brain effect drugs, like sedatives and some other powerful medications can't be bought without a medical prescription. But for example, anticoagulants can be bought without prescriptions! Imagine a person taking Warfarin without the need for that.

  Even if the person doesn't like the idea of self-prescription, the person still suffers from that, it causes lots of problems that can be symptomatic, such as gastritis, fibromyalgia, and even IBS. For sure our lives can be social pressure for someone to go through this path, however, is you have doctors screening you all the time, every year, isn't a thing that maybe can convince your head that you can go sick any day or another? On top of that, everyone knows people who had a type of Cancer, people fear of dying from Cancer more than being hit by a car or suffering any other car accident, which is much easier.

  I don't have data with me, it is just a hypothesis, the problem is complex since there are lots of things that can influence anxiety and hypochondria, I searched but I didn't find anything about this relationship. But maybe is an invitation to someone to research it?