What to do with a symptom

You'll still get symptoms, and some of them will need attention. So stopping the search can't mean ignoring your body. You need something to do with a symptom that's quick and safe, and that has an end. I'll call it the one look. It's my own arrangement of NHS advice, and nobody has tested it as a method.

If it might be an emergency, don't look anything up. The NHS says 999 is for life-threatening emergencies like strokes and heart attacks. If you're not sure whether you need 999, it says to get help from NHS 111, which can check your symptoms and tell you what to do. Don't search first in either case.

Otherwise, look once, at one trusted page. In the UK that means the NHS website. Search the symptom with "NHS" after it and open that page only. The NHS pages are written for this purpose and they're reviewed on a schedule. Nearly all of them have the same useful section, under a heading like "See a GP if".

Read for what to do. You can't read your way to a diagnosis, as chapter 3 showed. The page can tell you which of three things applies. It may say this needs urgent help. It may say see a GP, with a list of the circumstances. Or it may say this usually settles, and give a time after which you should see someone if it hasn't. Find which of those is yours. For the calf, the page says to see a GP if the twitch lasts more than two weeks, or is in more than one place, or the area feels weak or stiff.

Write down the instruction and the date. "Calf twitch. Started Saturday the 4th. See GP if still there on the 18th, or if it spreads, or if the leg feels weak." Put it in your calendar. You've now handed the watching to a date, so you don't have to carry it in your head.

Then close the page. Don't read the list of rare causes at the bottom. Don't go back to the results. The one look takes about four minutes. If the page says to see someone, make the appointment at the next opportunity and tell the doctor plainly what you've noticed and for how long. If it says wait, wait.

If you're unsure which applies, ask a person. A pharmacist can be asked without an appointment. 111 online will take you through questions and tell you where to go and how soon. Either is better than a second page, because both of them end with an instruction.

If the page seems too general, that's by design. You'll be tempted to think the page doesn't cover your case. Your twitch is in the calf and sometimes the eyelid, or it's worse after exercise, or it's been eleven days and not fourteen. A general page can't speak to those details, and no page can. The details of your case are what an examination is for. So if your situation doesn't clearly fall under "wait", treat it as falling under "ask a person". You might feel that one page is too little to go on. If so, the answer is to talk to someone qualified, and more pages won't help.

If you're not in the UK, choose your page in advance. Most countries have a national health service site, a health ministry site, or patient pages run by a large teaching hospital. Pick one now, while you're calm, and bookmark it. It should be written for the public and reviewed by clinicians, and it should tell you when to seek care. It shouldn't have a forum attached.

One look per symptom. If the same symptom is still bothering you tomorrow night, you already have your instruction and your date, and nothing has changed. Looking again won't give you anything new. If the symptom itself changes, that's new, and you can take one more look or ring the surgery.

You might object that this leaves you not knowing what the twitch is. It does. You'll know what to do about it and when, and that's all the search could ever have given you. Most of the time the symptom will go before the date arrives, and you won't ever find out what it was.