Blood, Injury & Medical · 11 entries
Blood, Injury and Medical Phobias
The one group whose physiology runs the other way. Where most phobias produce a racing heart and an urge to leave, blood, needles and injury produce a drop in blood pressure and a faint, and the blood-injection-injury type is the only one of the five DSM-5-TR names that is defined by a physiological response rather than by a class of feared thing.
The inversion changes what helps. Tensing the muscles raises pressure where relaxing lowers it, so somebody told to breathe deeply and relax before an injection is being pushed towards the faint rather than away from it, which is why the type has its own name. The consequences are public rather than private, because the people who avoid needles are also the people who do not donate blood and do not turn up for vaccination. The filing rule here is the procedure and the injury; illness, mortality and the body itself file with the body group, and vomiting and choking file with food and swallowing.
In this category
All 11 blood, injury and medical phobias
11 entries
- Fear of Being ScratchedThe reference entry names its own exception: for someone with a severe allergy to scratches, hair or fleas, it calls the fear quite appropriate rather than excessive.
- Fear of BloodVasovagal syncope is uncommon in phobias and routine in this one, which is why blood, needles and injury were classified as a single category in DSM-IV.
- Fear of Blood, Injections and InjuryThe only phobia whose physiology runs backwards, and the only one with a treatment derived from it. Relaxation is the wrong advice; applied tension is the right one.
- Fear of DoctorsThe only fear whose avoidance behaviour damages health directly. Its prevalence has never been reported, and the figure quoted instead measures something else.
- Fear of InjuryMerriam-Webster ties the word to combat. Wikipedia files it with blood and injections. One definition describes a veteran and the other a patient avoiding a procedure.
- Fear of Medical ProceduresOne American in three avoids the doctor when they think they need one. The clinical term for the severe form of that has never been counted.
- Fear of NeedlesRecognised by DSM-IV in 1994, and the one phobia type whose blood pressure falls instead of rising. Its four subtype shares add up to 110 per cent.
- Fear of SurgeryChildren fear the masked figure and the separation; adults fear the pain afterwards. A quarter of cataract patients feared blindness from the operation preventing it.
- Fear of the DentistAvoidance creates the painful problem that forces an emergency visit, which deepens the fear. The literature calls that loop the cycle of dental fear.
- ScanxietyFifty-seven studies used 81 measurement tools between them and reported prevalence from 0 to 83 per cent. The one agreed finding: the wait is the worst part.
- White Coat SyndromeUp to thirty per cent of mild hypertension diagnosed from clinic readings is this effect. People showing it do not look frightened and their heart rate does not rise.
Keep going
The other categories
- Social & InterpersonalFears whose object is other people: being judged by them, being among them, or being without them.
- The Body, Illness & DeathDeath, dying, disease, contamination, ageing and the body itself.
- Abstract & ExistentialFailure, the future, change, infinity, being forgotten.
- Places & SituationsEnclosed spaces, crowds, bridges, lifts, tunnels and flight.
Common questions
Questions about blood, injury and medical phobias
Why do people faint at the sight of blood?
Because this is the one specific phobia with its own physiology. Blood, injection and injury phobia produces a vasovagal drop in blood pressure rather than the rise every other fear produces, and the faint follows from the drop. The vasovagal type is put at half of all needle-fear cases and described as an inherited reflex rather than a learnt association.
What is the fear of needles called?
Trypanophobia is the formal term, and it is worth knowing that the clinical literature and Wikipedia both prefer the plain English name. DSM-IV recognised it in 1994 as a specific phobia of the blood-injection-injury type.
How common is blood-injection-injury phobia?
Held to the stricter diagnostic threshold for the group, and counting blood-related fears alongside needle-related ones, the figure is put at three to four per cent of the general population. Blood-injection-injury phobia is estimated at about four per cent of the population in the United States.
Why does relaxing make needle fear worse?
Relaxation lowers blood pressure, and in this group blood pressure is already falling. Applied tension, which raises it deliberately, is the response built for the mechanism, and it is the clearest case on this site of a distinction that changes what somebody would actually do. This catalogue records that the distinction exists and does not give treatment advice.