WHY PATIENTS CONSULT WHEN THEY COUGH - A COMPARISON OF CONSULTING ANDNON-CONSULTING PATIENTS

Background Although it is the commonest symptom presented to general p ractitioners (GPs), little is known about why someone decides to consu lt with a cough.Aim. To describe the illness behaviour of patients wit h a cough. Method. Patients who had consulted a GP because of a cough, and a group of subjects who had recently had a cough but had not cons ulted, were interviewed in a qualitative study that investigated how t hey made sense of their illness. Results. Consulting patients understo od their cough to be abnormally severe, whereas non-consulting subject s regarded their cough as 'normal' and mild. Consulting patients thoug ht the cough would interfere with social roles and non-consulting subj ects did not. The consulting patients were much more likely To be worr ied about the cough than the non-consulting subjects. In particular, h alf of the consulting patients were worried about their hearts, wherea s the non-consulting subjects were not. The two groups did not disting uish bacteria from viruses, and did not differ in beliefs about the ro le of antibiotics that they thought were needed for severe coughs. Bot h groups had concerns about pollution. Conclusions. For consulting pat ients, cough breached the 'taken for granted property' of health that the non-consulting subjects with a cough were able to maintain. Cough, for the consulting patients, was not a trivial illness.