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More than 5000 people have voted ten to one in favour of NHS Choices going for the Full Monty on its state-of-the-art body maps.
The Department of Health’s flagship website decided to ask patients whether a new interactive body should reveal all or not.
The maps, to be launched in January, will allow users to strip away the dummies’ skin to explore information about diseases and treatment.
Visitors to the NHS Choices website are invited to join “The Great Body Map Debate” and vote on whether the images should be anatomically correct and include genitalia or whether their nether regions should be masked.
The site says that since the time of the ancient Greeks there have been differing views over the depiction of the human body. The Greeks believed that heroes and gods should be depicted in a state of "heroic nudity".
This became the norm for most depictions of the human form in art and science until the middle of the nineteenth century when the public began to demand more modest portraiture. Even today, body maps on health websites worldwide appear with their genitalia masked or pixelated.
Professor Sir Muir Gray, chief knowledge officer for the NHS, told BBC Online that it was “completely bonkers” to censor the maps but EHI Primary Care understands that some Department of Health staff were keen for the idea to be binned.
An insider told EHI Primary Care: “The DH was very nervous and asked Ben Bradshaw [DH health minister] to stamp on it but he just thought it was a bit of fun.”
Voting so far has been ten to one in favour of the Full Monty with only a minority favouring the Action Man approach. The insider adding: “We’ve had quite a few comments like why don’t we just get on with more important things.”
Fiona Barr