Internet coughs up more strange, interesting facts (From Preston and Leyland Citizen)

Internet coughs up more strange, interesting facts

9:35am Monday 16th February 2009

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IS it tickly? Is it itchy? Does it sound like a bark? Or a foghorn? Is it accompanied by any other problems – hot flushes, rashes, or palpitations?

I should have known better than to turn to the internet to try to cure my cough.

It wasn’t just any old cough, but the horrible hacking variety, the sort you’d expect in Victorian sanatoriums. And it came without warning – I’d be sitting on the train to work and feel it welling up in my throat, then spend the next ten minutes desperately trying to stop sounding like a braying walrus, with my head jerking and tears running down my face, and kind-hearted souls offering me drinks.

I toyed with going to the doctors, but everyone was keen to remind me that "They’ll only send you away and say it’s a virus that can’t be cured with antibiotics." Its true – and the last time I saw my GP, about something else, I was in and out faster than a greyhound in a trap, pretty sure I’d been labelled a time waster.

So I typed my symptoms into Google. Next thing I know, I’m being steered in the direction of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and CT scans. ‘A persistent cough, especially since you don’t smoke and have not been exposed to any communicable diseases is abnormal, and a scan could rule out any abnormalities,’ one site said.

The others were equally scary. Answer ‘yes’ to a handful of questions and a sniffle can quickly turn into tuberculosis.

The internet is probably responsible for my doctors’ practice bringing in a rule whereby you have to discuss the problem with a GP before being given an appointment. "Well, I’ve got this pain in my leg and I looked on the computer and I think I’ve got deep vein thrombosis from sitting on the sofa too long…"

On-line health checks are becoming increasingly popular, with 100,000 people in the UK checking out their health in the last month using a free service from Bupa – that’s one person every 30 seconds. There are so many websites – netdoctor, loungedoctor, diagnoseme.com – you could come away from each with a different diagnosis.

I’m not knocking the internet – I came across a few great suggestions for home-made cough remedies, although I believe I’ve seen lemon juice and malt vinegar used to scour pans on house cleaning programmes, so I wouldn’t rely on it 100 per cent.

And researching anything on the internet throws up many ‘Quite Interesting’ facts.

I didn’t know, for instance, that Sir Walter Raleigh was convinced that tobacco was a good cure for coughs and often smoked a pipe. You wouldn’t get that snippet from your GP.

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