The unseen burden patients carry between appointments
A man sat in my waiting room, heart racing—not from chest pain, but from panic. He’d been Googling his symptoms all night. Not afraid of what is—terrified of what might be. This is the anticipatory anxiety of modern medicine—a silent epidemic that strikes before any diagnosis ever does.
Patients no longer arrive with just symptoms. They bring stories already constructed. Hours of scrolling. Threads of worst-case scenarios. Algorithms feeding fear. By …