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TOPIC SECTION:
Diagnosing ourselves
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How do you feel? Been overdoing it, need a decent night’s sleep? Feel under par?; perhaps you need to cut down on the booze. Have you had that bug that’s going round? Feelings about health are a matter of personal life history and individual
| '..it has become clear that patients often know what the matter is before they go to the doctor' |
common sense. When we wake in the morning, which of us doe
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Founded in 1908, the School Medical Service provided many people's first experience of clinical medicine in the period before the National Health Service.
Credit: NMPFT/Daily Herald Archive
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s not run a check of how we feel? Over breakfast we may wonder whether we’re not suffering from that rare condition described on the newspaper’s health pages. An indefinable ache may have us pulling down a well-thumbed ‘family doctor’ health manual. If it’s not gone by lunch time we may seek the advice of a friend or relative. By tea time we may log on to NHS Direct. Or, we may reach back into our own history; by midlife we may carry health assumptions that were taught to us as children, notions that in their turn may derive from our parents’ childhoods up to a century ago.
In the past, especially before the growth of modern health services in the twentieth century, self-diagnosis was the rule for many people because a much smaller proportion of the pop
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This home cholesterol testing kit was developed for use by people without medical training.
Credit: Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library
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ulation had access to organised health care than now. The surprise is perhaps that, in this period of medical availability, so much self-diagnosis goes on. In fact, since psychology began to have an impact on general practice from the 1950s onwards, it has become clear that patients often know what the matter is before they go to the doctor, and skilled GPs have learned to listen to their patients as the basis of their diagnosis.
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Many of our ideas on wellbeing date back to ancient Greek times, when balancing the ‘six non-naturals’ was considered the way to a healthy life. > more |
Many of us opt to take a more ‘holistic’ approach to treatment than modern medicine seems to favour. The use of ‘alternative medicine’ by so many has brought the practice into the mainstream. > more | |
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