Reading a news article online recently, I was stopped in my tracks by a reference to events that occurred “late last century”, only to discover the writer was talking about 1997.

Nothing makes you feel old and obsolete like the realisation that more than half of your life — childhood, education, medical school — has been lived in an era so ancient and long ago that it’s now known as “last century”.

Last century, the only real sources of information about health were books or your local GP. People trusted what doctors told them about health and medicine, maybe because they had so few other sources to rely on.

Now, of course, we have the internet, a resource that has turned a large portion of the population into self-taught experts on a wide range of subjects, including medicine.