British GPs feel squeezed by online medical consultation app “Babylon” and Copperfield, one of the regular contributors on their website, Pulse, describes what GPs do and suggests another app, cleverly named “Hypochondriapp”.
“It also reinforces the completely wrong notion that symptoms inevitably and algorithmically lead to a diagnosis. When does that ever happen? The reality is that symptoms result in a spaghetti junction of confusion and contradiction which we GPs manage with clever time-passing manoeuvres such as umming and aahing, or arranging unnecessary blood tests, until they resolve spontaneously, as they usually do.”
“Because there’s definitely a market for an app which recognises this by inviting punters to enter their symptoms, type in their feared diagnosis and accept the advice: ‘Forget it.’ This is my idea, I already have a name for it (Hypochondriapp).”
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