Why a Fear of Doctors Runs in My Family

Science says this pattern is more common, and more treatable, than we think

Eric Spitznagel,

AARP

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Published April 13, 2026

Illustration depicting a person looking worried while sitting in a doctor's examination room

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I’m lying on a therapist’s couch (metaphorically speaking; it’s a Zoom call), telling psychologist Reid Wilson about the time my grandfather almost talked his wife out of cancer surgery because he was afraid of hospitals.

“He was a doctor?” Wilson asks.

“He was a doctor,” I confirm.

Wilson is the director of the Anxiety Disorders Treatment Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the author of Stopping the Noise in Your Head: The New Way to Overcome Anxiety and Worry. He’s spent over 30 years helping people untangle their most irrational fears, but even he pauses at what I’ve shared.

My grandfather, a doctor of osteopathic medicine based in New York, spent his professional life examining and healing other people. He also refused to apply any of that wisdom to himself.

My grandfather, the doctor, holding me long before I understood that fears could be passed down like family silver.

Courtesy Eric Spitznagel

When my grandmother was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer in the mid-1980s and her doctors recommended surgery, my grandfather’s considered medical opinion was: Let’s just not. No surgery. No intervention. Maybe eat more vegetables. He seemed certain that the safest course of action was ignoring the problem.

My grandmother disagreed. She had the surgery and lived into her late 90s, while my grandfather died at 84 after a series of strokes he’d almost certainly seen coming (at least according to my grandmother) and chose not to address.

His son, my father, watched all this unfold and arrived at the same plan in a different disguise. Dad was a United Church of Christ pastor and a fitness devotee who jogged at least 5 miles every morning because he believed he could outrun any medical problem his body had the nerve to produce.

My father holding my brother and me, back when safety felt as simple as fitting inside his arms.

Courtesy Eric Spitznagel

He died at 60 from an undiagnosed enlarged heart, having not been to a doctor in six years.

In the year or two before he died, my father had been slipping and falling on his morning runs. He lost his footing on the ice so regularly that the family just assumed he needed to slow down. But he told my mother more than once that he wasn’t simply falling. He was blacking out. She begged him to go to the doctor, but he waved her off, saying it was probably just his body adjusting to the season.

My brother and I confronted him about it once, a few years before his death. We asked him, in the tentative way you confront a parent about something they’ve already decided not to hear, why he was so scared of going to the doctor. He laughed it off at first and did a little performance of offended dignity. Scared? He wasn’t scared. He just didn’t need to go. He felt fine. He was running 5 miles a day, for God’s sake! What did we think a doctor was going to tell him that his own two legs hadn’t already figured out?

We pushed a little. The performance started to slip. And then he went quiet for a moment and told us the truth: He was afraid that someone would tell him he was going to die.

That was it. Not a fear of needles or waiting rooms or cold stethoscopes. Just the fear of bad news, delivered by a stranger in a white coat, in a room he couldn’t leave.

After his death, my brother and I repeated this to each other as a kind of dark family joke: Well, no one ever told him he was going to die. He just skipped straight to the part where it happened.

Now I’m 57, three years away from when my dad died, on a Zoom call with a psychologist, and doing my best impression of a person who’s learned something from all of this.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the waiting room

I am not my grandfather or my father. I do go to the doctor. I make the appointments, I show up (mostly) and I sit in the waiting room. Which is to say, I’m catastrophically certain that each visit is the one where they finally discover the terminal diagnosis they’ve somehow missed during every previous visit.

The two or three days before any appointment, I’m basically useless. I run through scenarios. I consider which of my shirts I wouldn’t mind being cut off during emergency resuscitation. I practice conversations in my head, like where I tell my teenage son, Charlie, that his dad is not going to make it, all because I went in for a routine cholesterol check and somehow the blood pressure cuff triggered a chain of events no one could have predicted.

This is not, Wilson tells me gently, a great way to live.

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“What you’re describing is catastrophizing,” he says. “You’re not just worried about the appointment. You’re rehearsing the worst possible outcome in advance, which feels like preparation but is actually just suffering twice.” Imagining the worst-case scenario, he says, is a needlessly bad investment. The logic is impeccable, but my brain ignores it.

“The part you want to catch isn’t the automatic thought,” Wilson tells me. “You can’t stop that. But you can stop yourself from consciously embellishing it. You let it run. You give it permission to continue. You start participating.”

He’s right. I know he’s right. I also know that my blood pressure is going to spike the next time I’m at a doctor’s office, probably before I’ve even found a parking spot, and knowing he’s right is doing absolutely nothing about that.

The fear has a name, and it’s more common than you think

The clinical term for what my family has is iatrophobia, a fear of doctors, and it’s considerably more common than most people will admit.

According to a 2024 PatientPoint survey of 2,000 Americans, 54 percent reported feeling anxious before a doctor’s appointment, up from 39 percent in 2022. Four in 10 said they suffered anxiety over an undiagnosed health problem. And while only a small percentage of people receive a formal phobia diagnosis, the anxiety doesn’t require one to feel real.

On the left, the doctor who avoided doctors. On the right, the son who thought he could outrun bad news.

Courtesy Eric Spitznagel

The fear appears to intensify with age. A 2013 study published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine, drawing on a nationally representative U.S. sample, found that cancer worry predicted doctor avoidance, specifically in adults 50 and older, a pattern that didn’t hold for younger adults. A far larger 2025 meta-analysis published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, pooling data from 92 studies covering more than 564,000 people across 25 countries, found that nearly 1 in 3 people avoided or were likely to avoid medical information altogether. The closer you get to the age when things actually start going wrong, the more motivated you become to avoid finding out.

“It’s a phobia,” Wilson says. “An intense, irrational and persistent fear of a specific object or situation that is out of proportion to actual danger and causing significant distress, leading to active avoidance.”

The word “irrational” is interesting, because I’m pretty sure neither my father nor my grandfather would have recognized themselves in it. My grandfather was a physician who understood exactly what an untreated illness could do to the human body. My father was a smart man who knew that blacking out during a run wasn’t a symptom that resolved on its own. The knowledge didn’t help them; if anything, it made things worse. The more clearly you understand what could go wrong, the more vividly you can imagine it going wrong.

Psychologist and author Seth Gillihan describes this as the difference between what we know and what our brains have decided is true. “Over time, the accumulation of these danger signals and learned associations can become deeply ingrained assumptions, or ‘core beliefs,’ about what it means to seek medical care,” he explains. “Core beliefs, in turn, give rise to automatic thoughts, which tend to be treated not as the brain’s assumptions and guesses but as facts about reality.”

In other words, I don’t think I’m being irrational. I think I’m being accurate. The doctor’s office is genuinely terrifying, the same way a person who’s afraid of flying doesn’t think they’re being irrational — they think airplanes are actually dangerous. The fear feels like information.

Martin Antony, a professor of psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University and author of Overcoming Medical Phobias, has spent his career mapping this kind of avoidance. “Diagnostically, chronic avoidance of medical care is often consistent with a specific phobia of the blood-injection-injury type,” he told me — but this fear is not just tied to needles. It can be triggered by anything in the medical universe, from the waiting room to the exam table to the diagnosis.

But he notes that other conditions can look identical from the outside. Illness anxiety disorder, OCD and social anxiety can all produce the same result: a person making very creative excuses to avoid a physical.

The distinction matters, Antony says, because the underlying fear determines the right treatment. Someone dodging a doctor because they’re terrified of needles needs a different intervention than someone avoiding a checkup because they’re convinced they already have cancer and don’t want it confirmed.

“The key clinical question,” he says, “is what the person is most afraid of and what function the avoidance serves.”

In my family, the function was consistent across generations: Avoidance produced immediate relief, and immediate relief was its own reward. “Each time you avoid a trigger, the brain’s reward system releases dopamine, reinforcing the behavior as safe and desired,” Wilson says. Skip the appointment and you feel better. The brain files this away as evidence that skipping was the right call, and the cycle continues.

My grandfather skipped checkups, didn’t die immediately and concluded that checkups were unnecessary. My father ran 5 miles a day, felt healthy and concluded that doctors were redundant. Neither of them got to the part where they found out what happened next.

How to change your relationship with fear

The goal here is to change your relationship with fear, not to stop being afraid. “That’s asking too much,” Wilson says. “What you want is: When that thought pops up, step back and catch it. Don’t embellish it consciously.”

This is where I have gone wrong. My approach involved breathing exercises, visualization, trying to locate my happy place and reminding myself that statistically, everything is probably fine. None of it works. If anything, it tends to make things worse, because each technique comes loaded with the hope that it will work, and the hope itself becomes a source of dread. What if I do all the breathing and my blood pressure is still high? That means the breathing failed, which means something is wrong with me, which means —

Wilson cuts me off before I can finish that sentence in my head.

“As soon as you think, ‘God, I hope this works,’ you’re telling your amygdala to prepare the body and mind for danger,” he says. “And then it goes, ‘Yes, boss,’ and secretes epinephrine [a hormone that makes you feel anxious when you’re in fight-or-flight mode]. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The paradoxical alternative is to stop caring. “I don’t care whether my heart rate is high or not,” Wilson says, modeling the desired attitude. “I don’t care.”

He makes it sound easy. It is not easy. But he’s describing something I recognize as the opposite of what I do, which is at least a starting point.

‘Whatever happens, you’ll handle it’

Gillihan calls that pattern of behavior “coping neglect.” It’s when fear holds your attention on the worst-case scenario while blocking your awareness of your ability to handle it. My grandfather wasn’t just avoiding the doctor. He was protecting reality. As long as he didn’t go, whatever was wrong didn’t exist.

The therapeutic answer is to interrupt that loop through what Antony calls “gradual exposure”: a ladder of steps, starting from wherever you are and moving toward the thing you’re avoiding.

Wilson’s hierarchy begins with something as low-stakes as watching a medical procedure on YouTube and getting comfortable with the imagery. From there, you work up through sitting in your car in a hospital parking lot, a telehealth visit and eventually an in-person checkup with a support person in the waiting room.

“Fear tends to persist without confrontation,” Antony says, “but exposure-based treatment has strong empirical support and can work surprisingly quickly when done systematically.”

Toward the end of my session, Wilson says something I feel in my body before I fully process it in my head.

“Whatever happens, you’ll handle it.”

Not: Everything will be fine. Not: The news will probably be good. Whatever happens, you’ll handle it.

Something releases slightly in my chest when he says it. “It’s an attitude,” he says. “It’s not ‘I know how I will cope.’ It’s that your disposition is, ‘We’ll handle whatever comes.’ And notice the difference between ‘I have to go to the doctor’ and ‘I want to go to the doctor.’ Because ‘I have to’ puts you in a position of obligation without ownership. ‘I want to’ reminds you why.”

I have many whys. I want to live long enough to attend Charlie’s college graduation. I want to meet his future partner someday, and his kids if he decides to become a parent. I want to be the first man in three generations of Spitznagels who didn’t leave his family ahead of schedule because he was too afraid to find out what was happening inside his own body.

My father could have handled it, too. It might’ve meant surgeons cracking open his chest and doing the kinds of things that terrified him most. But he could have handled that. People do, every day. And if he had, there’s a chance he’d still be here — meeting Charlie, going by Grandpa Spitz, showing up to jazz concerts and baseball games and pretending to understand whatever YouTube personalities his grandson was into. He decided, without any evidence, that he couldn’t handle it. And so he isn’t here.

The appointment he never made is the one I think about most. I have one on the calendar. And I’ve already picked out a shirt I don’t mind losing.

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