I've always understood the essence of general practice to be about managing uncertainty. When medical students spend time at our surgery, I try to convey to them the way in which general practice differs from specialist care and how central this concept of uncertainty is. I've been fond of quoting to them (not necessarily accurately), Marshall Marinker's observation that in general practice we marginalise danger, while specialists increase certainty. I'm beginning to wonder whether I should stop. I may be able to live with uncertainty, but my patients don't want to know about probabilities, they want certainty, they want answers and they've got the internet.
Never mind that there is so much about health out there on the world wide web, and that they'll have visited a wholly indiscriminate selection of sites. Nor that much of what …