Talk:Matchbox sign

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Is this page truly necessary? I feel it may have been created solely to undermine sufferers of the disease/syndrome referred to as "Morgellons." Is there a way to see if other articles link to this page? I have a sneaking suspicion none do. There needs to be a real citation to verify this term's currency in the medical community in any case.

The reference to AAFP.org (cited in the article) shows that the term was already being used in 2001 (Leitao went public in 2002), and was common enough that the author did not feel the need to describe it as new terminology; in fact, my personal opinion is that term had been coined in 2001, it would have been quite different, because by 2001 matches were much more often sold in packs than in boxes. And to forestall any suggestions that it might have been used in the AAFP article as a reference to Leitao, note that the authors of the AAFP article were in California, and Leitao was in Pennsylvania. They would not have attended, met, or even known of her. DS (talk) 14:48, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Maybe this article itself was created because of all the fuss around "morgellons" but the concept itself being used to describe delusional parasitosis sufferers in general is much older. Earliest reference to it is a letter to the Lancet in 1983. And as the above user notes, the term "matchbox sign" would never have been coined in the 21st century. Instead we'd be calling it the ziplock bag sign, or the out-of-focus smart phone photo sign. --2.125.31.119 (talk) 01:42, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

Term is still in use as of 2013. see references.--Akrasia25 (talk) 12:43, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

Updated to included 2019 secondary reviews (and remove primary sources) that use and expand the term to include Ziploc bag, etc. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:47, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

Does it matter what's in the matchbox?

The article reads as if the definition of the "matchbox sign" is simply that the patient brings in a sample - that is, that bringing a sample is in itself considered an indication that the patient is delusional, without needing to look in the matchbox to see whether there is, in fact, anything abnormal in there. This hardly seems likely. Is that, in fact, the case, or is the "matchbox sign" specifically the bringing in of containers which are found to have nothing unusual in them? If it was just bringing in samples in general, it seems as if it would be about the only case in medicine of trying to give your doctor a medical sample being seen as a pathological symptom!  :-D Wombat140 (talk) 04:42, 26 December 2022 (UTC)