TY - JOUR T1 - After Achilles JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 115 LP - 115 DO - 10.3399/bjgp16X683869 VL - 66 IS - 644 AU - Roger Jones Y1 - 2016/03/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/66/644/115.abstract N2 - Almost 45 years ago John Howie, one of the heroes of academic general practice and Richard Scott’s successor to the world’s first chair in general practice in Edinburgh, published a article in the Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners entitled Diagnosis — the Achilles heel? 1 Howie argued that the decision by a GP to prescribe for a set of symptoms frequently preceded the allocation of a diagnostic label to those symptoms. A patient with a cough and sputum might get an antibiotic, and someone with a vague feeling of unease without any obvious cause might receive a benzodiazepine. The diagnosis followed the prescription. Although in many regards these observations reflected the more general state of medicine in the early 1970s, general practice has still not really shaken off its struggle with … ER -