Benjamin Daniels - Further Confessions of a GP

One of my young Polish patients asked me why doctors in the NHS only prescribe paracetamol. The answer is, of course, that we don’t. I prescribed him paracetamol for his slightly sore knee and explained that it would get better on its own. He told me that in Poland he would have got an X-ray and seen an orthopaedic surgeon. I also prescribed him paracetamol for his viral sore throat. In Poland his doctor would have apparently performed a chest X-ray and given antibiotics. I have prescribed him only simple painkillers for his ailments because they are benign and due to the amazing self-healing power of the human body they will get better all on their own. He is a fit 28-year-old who doesn’t need extensive medical investigations for his minor health complaints, but were a privately run health clinic to be set up in our local town, I suspect he would happily part with £70 to see a non-NHS GP. I’ve not seen many private doctors prescribe a cheap drug like paracetamol when they can prescribe numerous more expensive ones. It would also be lucrative for a private practitioner to order as many expensive investigations as possible. These should be done quickly, as once the patient gets better, he may not be quite so willing to part with his credit card details.

Going against the grain, I do have one Polish patient who isn’t quite so critical of the NHS. She is only 23 years old and has been working here as a waitress. She came to see me one afternoon with a lump on her arm. It was hard and craggy and felt like it was attached to the bone. I placed her urgently on the cancer referral pathway and within 10 days she had seen a specialist, who unfortunately agreed with my diagnosis. She had a rare aggressive bone cancer called an osteosarcoma and it needed urgent treatment. She was sent to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London where she received top-notch cancer treatment and the sort of specialist surgery that only a few places in the world can offer. She is now back at work with only a small scar on her forearm to remind her of her recent brush with death. She went back home to Warsaw last month to take her notes and scans to a Polish doctor for his opinion. He told her that the management for her condition in Poland would have been to amputate her arm above the elbow.

Those most ill tend not to be the ones who complain loudly about the NHS. A person who has been hit by a bus or is being treated for cancer tends to sing praises for the treatment they receive. The private clinics steer well clear of those who are seriously unwell as there is no money to be made from them. I can’t imagine a team of private doctors offering to set up an independent A&E department. The private sector prefer to cherry pick the fortunate majority, who are basically fairly well but are often disgruntled with the NHS. The private health-care system in the USA is extremely lucrative for the same reason. They also make their huge profits by targeting their services to well people. For example, they have scared the population into believing that they all need yearly colonoscopies to screen for bowel cancer. Each colonoscopy test costs on average $1,185, while here in the UK we test poo for signs of bowel cancer instead which costs around £10. Studies suggest that both techniques have similar levels of effectiveness as a screening tool, but the American insurance companies can’t make any money out of a £10 poo test. Of course, the real crime in the USA is that people with bowel cancer but no health insurance die, unable to afford a colonoscopy or the potentially life-saving treatment they need. Thank goodness for the NHS.

Much as I love the principles of the NHS, I don’t live in a bubble and I would be the first to admit that it can be a bit rubbish sometimes, as can some of the people who work within it. We need to constantly root out our failings and strive to improve it from within. Sometimes this feels like an impossible task and when the NHS is on the receiving end of a constant barrage of abuse from the media, it can be tempting to look to the private sector as a way out. A private health clinic recently asked me if I’d consider leaving the NHS to become a private GP. I said no, and for two reasons. The first was that if patients are really sick, there is nothing better than our local NHS services. Secondly, I became a doctor to provide sick people with what they need, rather than offer well people what they want.

‘Don’t look down, Ben,’ I was saying to myself over and over in my head. My throat was tightening and beads of sweat were forming on my forehead. No, I wasn’t walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon – it was much harder than that. I was trying to maintain eye contact with a patient and avoid looking down at her ridiculously enormous breasts.

Well into her late 40s, every other part of Julie’s body was moving in a southerly direction, but somehow her breasts were defying Newton’s laws and appeared perfectly suspended by an invisible force that was maintaining them at an exact right angle to her body. I was rather hoping that Julie was completely unaware of the tricky battle going on in my head, but I suspect not. She was wearing a particularly skimpy top given the cold spell of weather we’d been having and just when I seemed to be successfully maintaining uninterrupted eye contact, she would push her chest out and wriggle in her seat, throwing me completely off my game.

I had met Julie once or twice before, but had no previous recollection of her breasts. I would like to point out that I don’t generally remember my patients on the basis of their bra size, but such was the oddity of the bosoms that I was trying desperately to ignore that I couldn’t believe they would have previously passed me by unnoticed. I had watched enough episodes of Celebrity Big Brother to be able to at least hazard a guess that they were fake, but such was my desperation not to be caught staring that I couldn’t be 100 per cent sure that they were in fact due to prosthetics rather than genetics.

After the normal small talk about the weather, Julie told me why she was there.

‘I just need another sick note, Doctor.’

Scanning through her medical notes, I could see that Julie only ever really attended the surgery for sick notes. Every six months or so she would see a doctor and be signed off work for depression. She had always declined counselling or antidepressants, but when on her last visit I’d asked her to fill in a depression questionnaire, she scored maximum points and so the sick note was extended. Surely this time I couldn’t sign her off work quite so readily. She had almost certainly had a boob job since her last visit and this was throwing me into an ethics minefield. Can you really be too depressed to work yet voluntarily endure the pain and stress of major cosmetic surgery? What about the money? Are you allowed to claim benefits if you have a spare £6,000 for a new set of breasts? Most importantly for me, how was I going to broach this sensitive subject? Such was my inert sense of awkwardness, I could barely bring myself to even glance at Julie’s breasts, let alone declare them as a topic of conversation. Imagine the embarrassment I would face if I cited her false breasts as evidence that she couldn’t be depressed and they turned out to be real! I decided I would have to approach the subject from a different angle.

‘So, how is your depression at the moment, Julie?’

‘Actually, not that bad, Doctor. I’m feeling happier than I have done for a long time.’

Great, I thought to myself. No sick note for you, and I wouldn’t have to mention the two white elephants in the room. This was turning out to be considerably less stressful than I had feared.

‘I was depressed before, so my Gary bought me these new boobs for my birthday and it’s worked a treat. My Gary always knows how to cheer me up and they’ve put a big smile on his face too! What do you reckon of them?’ Julie asked, proudly pushing her chest in my direction.