Anxiety disorders and their importance for the general practitioner
Anxiety disorders are a group of the neuroses associated with unreasonable and destabilizing feeling of fear and tension without any determinable reason. Anxiety disorders affect numerous patients and doctors of all specialties frequently have to cope with the situations concerning various types of these diseases.
There are various kinds of anxiety disorders:
Agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is the fear to find oneself in a situation when it is difficult to get help from other people and from which it is difficult to escape quickly, as occurs, for example, on the bridge or in a crowd, in a bus, and the underground. It is frequently accompanied by panic attacks.
Panic disorder. Panic disorder is the sudden intensive causeless fear, which attains the maximum within several minutes and has not been connected to frightening situations or subjects. Patients often develop panic symptoms such as the fear to go mad, lose self-control, the fear of death or that something awful may happen now. The patients experience tachycardia, difficulty in breathing, feeling of shortage of air with suffocation, panic attacks of faintness and dizziness. Quite often the patients with panic disorder are diagnosed with neurocirculatory dystonia or vascular dystonia, and panic attacks are interpreted as vegetative or diencephalic crises.
Specific (isolated) phobia. This kind of phobia is characterized by a strong fear of particular object or situation, for example, heights, mice, spiders.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder. The patient is tormented by obsessive painful ideas and thoughts, which prevent him or her from leading a normal way of life and frequently result in obsessive actions and rituals. Examples are excessive fear of dirt or infectious diseases resulting in continuous washing of hands; repeating of the same name or a word many times; repeated checkup whether the door is closed, whether the oven is switched off, whether the window is closed.
Post-traumatic stress disorder. This disorder frequently develops in patients who have survived life menacing situation or accidents such as military actions, the atomic power station catastrophe, a road accident, etc. Patients experience painful recollections, excessive abnormal sensitivity to sensory stimulation, irritability and fits of anger. Doctors also notice characteristic sleep disturbances such as insomnia.
Generalized anxiety disorder. This disorder is characterized by the constant feelings of tension, anxiety and fear of forthcoming troubles in everyday life within several months. The frequent symptoms are an excessive strain and tension of the muscles, irritability, problems with sleep and chronic weariness. Generalized anxiety disorder is quite often accompanied by depression.
Social phobia. The patients experience the pronounced fear of being in the center of attention or fear to behave in such a manner that it will cause confusion or humiliation in certain situations. The most typical situations are communication or eating in public places, a casual meeting of familiar persons in public, staying with small groups (for example, at the evening parties, assemblies, in a class room).
Adjustment disorder. It is a condition of a subjective distress and the emotional disorder, interfering with normal activity and arising during adaptation to significant change in life or to stressful event.
The prevalence of the anxiety disorders is very wide. In the activity of the general practitioner there are more patients with anxiety disorders than patients with diabetes and bronchial asthma taken together. According to the statistic data, 9 % of the patients are single-stage sufferers with some anxiety disorders, and 25 % of people experience anxiety disorders during life.
Known remedy for diabetes is the bitter gourd, another name of better is ‘karela’. Take this herb very often or drink at best 15 gram of karela juice every day to decrease sugar levels in your blood and urine. Does diabetes affect the mental health of a person?