Want to know what will be coming through the door of your surgery, clinic or consulting room this month? Well, look no further than your supermarket. The clue is on the little yellow stickers appearing on boxes of free range eggs.
Those little labels inform shoppers that, at the moment, hens are no longer roaming free in fields and pastures but are housed in barns for their welfare.
A few hyper-alert customers will do a little more digging and find the change has not been brought about by high winds and snow but has been triggered by an outbreak of bird flu.
It’s enough to make a hypochondriac storm their GP surgery with a list of implausible symptoms: feathers where they shouldn’t be and uncontrollable clucking.
But bird flu isn’t the only threat. What about pollution in the atmosphere, radiation from North Korea’s nuclear testing programme and gluten in bread?
These are the sorts of issues that keep the worried well awake at night.
The challenge for medical professionals is to sort sufferers into one of three categories: those with a health problem; sufferers from health anxiety, those with a long-term chronic condition that also needs proper treatment.
There is, of course, one more group: those who spend too much time looking up their symptoms on the internet and coming to startling conclusions – when it’s far more likely they have too much time on their hands.
For example, one of the most common requests to GPs is patients demanding an allergy test. Nearly 12% of the population has been tested, despite the fact only 1% of the population suffers from allergies.
Last month the British Journal of General Practice said before they wasted any more NHS money on expensive tests, doctors should ask patients a few simple questions about their history of hayfever.
If it turns out they don’t have it and none of their family has ever suffered from it, their chances of being allergic to anything else is almost nil.
If you’re looking on s1jobs for vacancies in all of the medical, dental and healthcare professions, this means to do any of these jobs takes more than just medical, surgical and nursing training – as if this wasn’t enough!
You also need the ability to tell the difference between illness and anxiety, while simultaneously handling the emotional needs of patients.
For all the latest Medical, Dental and Healthcare vacancies visit s1jobs.com