Bad Medicine: The worried hell

Abstract

The ‘worried well’. I can’t quite remember when I heard this expression, nor who might have coined it. But it is common parlance in medicine and all GPs understand its meaning implicitly. I know that we shouldn’t use stereotypes, but where is the fun in that? The worried well are educated patients, perhaps with too much time on their hands, who repeatedly attend the surgery with reams of internet pages. Dr Google always diagnoses possible cancer or an appalling life-shortening degenerative condition, catastrophising all symptoms, irrespective of the probability. And the worried well reflect the general levels of high anxiety paralysing one in four of us a year. Is this the new norm, the consequence of wealth and free time, …