Can GPs do more to help patients with facial disfigurement?

The book Wonder details the travails of a 10 year old boy with a facial disfigurement who tells the reader: “I won’t describe what I look like. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.”1 The story was inspired by an encounter the author, R J Palacio, had in a shop with a girl whom she now believes had Treacher Collins syndrome, a rare genetic condition that causes craniofacial abnormalities. Worried about her son’s reaction to the girl Palacio fled the shop, while the words of the girl’s mother echoed behind her: “Okay guys, I think it’s time to go.”

“It was horrible, just horrible. My heart broke for this woman and for this girl, for whom this must happen a million times each day,” Palacio said in a newspaper interview.2

This scenario of extreme social embarrassment is familiar to Carly Bailey, who developed facial paralysis when she was 14, and describes …