Have you ever worried that your doctor doesn't know what he or she is talking about? Have you ever thought that beneath that beguiling bedside manner lies a sense of confusion bordering upon panic? Then you would be right. Here in the UK it is estimated that as many as 15% of General Practitioners (G.P.'s) aren't up to the job. This is a worrying statistic when you consider that the British Medical Association admits that as many as 36,000 people die in the UK alone, as a result of some kind of medical intervention that either went wrong or was wrong. 36,000! That's about ten times more than are killed on the roads! It's almost as many as are killed by smoking! Makes you think, doesn't it?
Imagine what would happen to you if you invented an industrial process or product that killed that many people. Think of the uproar if an alternative practitioner such as a homoeopath killed just one patient, let alone tens of thousands.
The first thing doctors are taught is "Do no harm". They are also taught that nearly all illnesses are self limiting. That is, that the human body will heal itself, given time. This leads to an interesting paradox…an ill person goes to a doctor feeling like death and the best thing the doctor can do for them is to tell them to go away again!
It works like this; ten people feel ill and go to their doctor. The doc tells them all to go away and take it easy, keep warm, drink plenty of fluids and have a few days off work and to come back again in a week's time if they still feel ill. A week later, and six of the ten have got better naturally and think highly of their clever doctor for giving them such wise advice. To the four remaining the advice is repeated and a prescription is given for a mild drug with an un-pronounceable name, usually an entry level anti-biotic, a pain killer of perhaps even a placebo.
A week later two more of the patients have recovered and can highly recommend their doctor, describing him or her as being "brilliant". So far eight out of the original ten have got better all by themselves and the erstwhile general practitioner has taken all of the credit. When the remaining two enter the consulting rooms our G.P. thinks “Oh no, they really must be ill” and promptly arranges an appointment for them with a specialist at the local hospital who will then arrange all the various tests, investigations, treatments etc. In this particular role, the G.P. has performed an important and necessary task usually carried out in an emergency room by a triage nurse earning a fifth of the salary.
It seems then that the G.P. is over qualified and over paid for the role they play. Of course this is a gross over simplification of the job they do, but in essence I believe it is largely correct. At least the opportunities for the family doctor to kill you are remote. It's the tired, overworked, over targeted, under budgeted, under trained junior doctors up at the hospital who might do that. Then there is the ever present modern plague of hospital acquired infections such as MRSA and C-Difficile, but that's another story.
However, your life expectancy is higher now than at any time in history, so do not despair. So long as you take everything your doctor says with a massive pinch of salt, get a second opinion and for Pete's sake, stay healthy and keep away from hospital!
