From Farah Mendlesohn
I took exception to the Netropolitan column
(25 March, p 17) which warned of
patients handing “reams of laser-printed Web pages” to their GPs and declared:
“It can only get worse.” As far as I am concerned, it can only get better.
Without the Net, I would not have had access to the full symptoms of coeliac
disease, which aided in my diagnosis in 1997. The medical dictionaries were
rather vague.
I succeeded with self-diagnosis in the face of my GP’s insistence that I was
either too young for the condition, or suffering from “tension”. I look forward
to the day when filling in a computerised multiple-choice paper is the first
stage in a doctor’s diagnosis. We might then avoid the “intuitive” assumption
that persistent patients are hypochondriacs, and the supposedly scientific
diagnosis of catch-all “syndromes”.
Reading, Berkshire
