As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the country telehealth consultations have increased too. And with them the inability to practise medicine as we’ve all been taught from medical school. 

Telehealth has severely limited our ability to perform proper history taking, physical examination, bedside testing and the chance to use our ‘Spidey sense’ as I call it.  

This Spidey sense is the gut feel that GPs get on seeing a patient in-person that intuitively guides us on whether they are genuinely sick or not, despite what they may be saying.  

The classical cases are undiagnosed depression and cancer, where we can see the patient lacks emotion or is pale and cachectic even though they’re saying, “I’m fine doc”.