A picture is worth a thousand words. If I told you that the caption to the one I had in mind read “Hunneybel from Essex has 38G hooters . . .” you’d imagine something from a lad mag such as Zoo or Nuts. You’d be wrong.

Mrs Hunneybel, Lou to her friends, lives in Essex, and her enormous bosom hit the headlines this week when she sent a photo of her ample chest to her primary care trust.

Until recently she had a chest that meant she experienced backache and a nasty yeast infection called “intertrigo” – a skin rash under each breast caused by the same fungus that causes athlete’s foot.

She asked to be referred to her local hospital to talk to a specialist about breast reduction surgery. Without even seeing her, the local primary care trust returned her GP’s referral letter. They considered her problem to be cosmetic, not medical, and insisted that consultations regarding cosmetic surgical procedures were not available on the NHS.

So Lou’s husband Andrew whipped out his digital camera and she whapped out her mammaries. Next morning a set of 8 x 10 glossy prints illustrating the nature and severity of her condition landed on the PCT’s desk. A little later she became one of the 4,000 or so patients who manage to get their breast reduction surgery paid for by the NHS each year. Good for her.

I don’t know why GPs and patients don’t use photos more often. Almost everybody has access to a digital camera, either built into their mobile phone or PC.

Patients really do show up in my surgery and attempt to describe a rash that had appeared the previous day but vanished overnight. They really want to know what it was; I really want to know why they care. At least if they had a picture of their spots to show me I might have been able to venture an opinion.

Not only can photographs be used to diagnose skin conditions, they can be used to monitor their progress.

Watch that ringworm, another yeast infection, fade away after a few days’ treatment with an antifungal cream and then watch it come back again after you ignore the bit in the instructions about continuing to treat the area for seven days after the rash goes.

Entertain your friends with your “My Alopecia” photo album on Facebook or MySpace, showing the hair missing from your coin-shaped bald patch gradually regrowing, just as the doctor said it would. Document granny’s horrible leg ulcer shrinking to nothing but a tiny pale scar under the expert care of her district nurse.

So far, so routine. Perhaps digital video technology may even one day venture into the realm of out-of-hours care.

When I was too young and stupid to know better, I spent my evenings visiting people who perceived their need for medical attention to be urgent. One night I got a message on my pager about a toddler whose parents thought he had meningitis. Within minutes I was ringing their doorbell and, as the front door opened, I was flattened by a three-year-old on a tricycle, who was being pursued down the garden path and into the sunset by the family dog.

“Not much wrong with him, eh?” I quipped. “Now where’s the sick one?” “That was him, doc. Got a rash on his thigh.” One brief skirmish later, during which I managed to convey my disappointment at being called out for no reason, I suggested they make an appointment for next morning.

Complaints about out-of-hours care have tripled since 2004 when most GPs walked away from this stressful and virtually unpaid nonsense to spend some quality time with their families. If the Government passes the buck to private companies, they’ll have to screen out the time-wasters and their trivia mercilessly if they’re going to turn a profit.

So if you think your kid’s really poorly one night and needs a doctor, you’d better be ready to pop him up in front of your webcam to prove it.

Dr Copperfield is an Essex GP. He also writes for Doctor magazine