Hope in Optimising Health

Abstract

A news article, published in 2014, recounted the story of a young woman in Cheshire, UK, who made a self-diagnosis of a condition called cyanosis, involving a bluish discoloration of the skin, typically lips, fingers, and toes. Cyanosis is not a condition per se but can indicate an underlying pathology, such as chronic obstructive lung disease, heart failure, or pneumonia; the blueness being due to the lack of oxygen to the patient’s extremities. It is, in short, something for those so afflicted to worry about. However, in this instance, the doctor whom the woman consulted was not convinced about her diagnosis. He noted what the patient was wearing and asked if her jeans were new and then used a tissue to wipe the denim blue off her hands. The doctor commented, ‘She’d had her hands in her pockets and the dye had rubbed off on them…. She did laugh but said when she put “blue hands” into the [Google] search engine, it was cyanosis that had come up.’ The article went on to note that the condition ‘cyberchondria’ (‘as some GPs have dubbed it’) and the patient category ‘the worried well’ was on the rise, fuelled by Google and Wikipedia searches, whereby individuals ‘are diagnosing themselves from food allergies to brain tumours’ (Frith, 2014a: 35).