Welcome back to the Anxiety Slayer Podcast. I'm Shan Vanderbilt and today I have the

pleasure of sharing a conversation with Dr Karen Kasiday about her book Freedom from Health Anxiety.

Dr. Kasiday empowers patients to overcome their struggles with anxiety, compulsions, phobias, social anxiety, worry, and depression.

She approaches each patient with enthusiasm, persistence, and a keen sense of humor, crafting individualized research-based treatment

plans for each person.

Her goal is to make each patient an expert at managing their own anxiety so they can face any future

event with confidence and courage.

Welcome to Anxiety Slayer, Karen. Thank you so much, Shan.

I'm really excited to be here.

It's a pleasure to have you here,

and I must say your book, Freedom from Health Anxiety,

is fantastic. our listeners wow this is what we hear from

them the most is please cover more about health anxiety and what can I do when I'm

fixated on sensations in my body and worst-case

scenarios and the list goes on and on and on. I'm so grateful that you're going to be

able to help us address some of this stuff. I'd like to begin with suggestions that you might have that can

help us lighten up when we have persistent anxiety about our health and how we can assess and address these

negative thoughts and feelings and sometimes symptoms.

I want to validate the fact, you know, for everyone who's listening that this is one of those things

in the anxiety universe that often gets overlooked because of the fact that it has to do with medical stuff. And so people get

misdirected, they get into the medical system, and then things can just get mangled if your health care team doesn't

understand that anxiety is the problem. That is, it's very difficult then and then also I think a lot of

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