This is a placeholder until I can get some time to blog about this properly.
IMO it’s NOT fundamentally because we have access to ‘Internet diagnoses’.
It’s because of ‘awareness raising campaigns’. Have you watched the telly, travelled on a bus or a tube train, or shopped in a supermarket recently?
Then you can’t have failed to notice the overwhelming volume of health advisory & awareness ‘adverts’.
Honestly, depending on where you look, you’ll see stuff about diabetes, heart disease, every different type of cancer etc. It is utterly pervasive, and I’ve been wondering for a long time if this saturation of health hectoring and fear-mongering has driven up cases of hypochondria.
And it has.
More on this when I get the time…
AJ
Al Jahom's Final Word 
Once again you have hit the mark. I am ambivalent about the NHS: I love it and hate to see it gradually eroded away. At the same time expensive and seemingly purposeless health promotion campaigns give credance to the lie that it is well funded. I was invited to participate in a street campaign to take a series of tests to confirm whether i was at risk of having hepatitis. I pointed out that a simple blood test would confirm the matter definitely one way or another. All i received was a bemused look from the nurse who was conducting the tests.
Absolutely. We are constantly told that we are overweight, not getting enough exercise, eating too much salt, and at risk of dying of any one of a hundred different ailments at any moment. So when my GP remarked about me being “young and fit” I was temporarily gobsmacked.
Although he may have meant in comparison to himself.