A laugh out loud account of being a doctor in general practice in the UK. The subtitle tells it perfectly. Amid the hillarious anecdotes are some quite serious ones. When it is more about life and death, less about earwax.

The book is hillariously funny with genuine insights, moral dilemmas and a really grave case that keeps haunting me and I wish I could unread it (who would expect it in an entertaining book? Then again, this is what life is like.). Sometimes you just have to have the stomach even to read his stories and he(?) experienced them! It is much more lighthearted at the beginning and is getting more and more serious towards the end.

Sometimes it’s shocking to witness him saying “oh well it’s somebody else’s problem now”. How he gives up the fight with (for) a patient. However, he always tries at least and maybe he sees his limits realistically. The problem with grown-ups is you can’t help them if they don’t want you to. Sometimes I feel he gives up too easily, doesn’t fight enough. But maybe it’s me who fights too much.

The descriptions are hillarious: “Her face looks like a pitbull slowly chewing a wasp.” (p.72) "He was only in his early forties but hadn’t left his bungalow for nine years. The medical notes seemed to suggest that this was due to a history of agoraphobia, but more obvious on meeting him was that there would be no way Mr Hogden would have fitted through the door. He was fucking enormous.” (p.85) “His back aches because, like him, it is 90 years old.” (p.119) “He’s not particularly blessed in the brains department and has a very high TTT score. TTT stands for tattoo to teeth.” (p.263)

And some genuine insights: “Regardless of the country it is practised in, most of hospital medicine is painting over the cracks rather than fixing the wall.” (p.76) “As a parent myself, I do realise that it is hugely anxiety-provoking to have this small person for whom you are solely responsible and whom you love overwhelmingly and unconditionally.” (p.104)

If I were to show you all my favourite quotes, I would quote the whole book. His opinion about being a parent, ageing, weight problems, racism, vaccines, home births, being a doctor in a wonderfully entertaining, and at the same time thought-provoking book. It is absolutely worth reading. ( )

A laugh out loud account of being a doctor in general practice in the UK. The subtitle tells it perfectly. Amid the hillarious anecdotes are some quite serious ones. When it is more about life and death, less about earwax.

The book is hillariously funny with genuine insights, moral dilemmas and a really grave case that keeps haunting me and I wish I could unread it (who would expect it in an entertaining book? Then again, this is what life is like.). Sometimes you just have to have the stomach even to read his stories and he(?) experienced them! It is much more lighthearted at the beginning and is getting more and more serious towards the end.

Sometimes it’s shocking to witness him saying “oh well it’s somebody else’s problem now”. How he gives up the fight with (for) a patient. However, he always tries at least and maybe he sees his limits realistically. The problem with grown-ups is you can’t help them if they don’t want you to. Sometimes I feel he gives up too easily, doesn’t fight enough. But maybe it’s me who fights too much.

The descriptions are hillarious: “Her face looks like a pitbull slowly chewing a wasp.” (p.72) "He was only in his early forties but hadn’t left his bungalow for nine years. The medical notes seemed to suggest that this was due to a history of agoraphobia, but more obvious on meeting him was that there would be no way Mr Hogden would have fitted through the door. He was fucking enormous.” (p.85) “His back aches because, like him, it is 90 years old.” (p.119) “He’s not particularly blessed in the brains department and has a very high TTT score. TTT stands for tattoo to teeth.” (p.263)

And some genuine insights: “Regardless of the country it is practised in, most of hospital medicine is painting over the cracks rather than fixing the wall.” (p.76) “As a parent myself, I do realise that it is hugely anxiety-provoking to have this small person for whom you are solely responsible and whom you love overwhelmingly and unconditionally.” (p.104)

If I were to show you all my favourite quotes, I would quote the whole book. His opinion about being a parent, ageing, weight problems, racism, vaccines, home births, being a doctor in a wonderfully entertaining, and at the same time thought-provoking book. It is absolutely worth reading. ( )

A good book offering insight with humour into the life of a doctor.

For a more detailed review click on the link below:

http://onerightword.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/confessions-of-gp-benjamin-daniels.ht... ( )

I went into this expecting a bunch of funny patient encounters. What I found was a much more well rounded book. This gives a unique view of the NHS and the people who access it, from someone on the front line. Some of the passages made me want to rip them out, photocopy them & shove them into the face of half the people clogging up the waiting room of my local GP's surgery. ( )

This book, written under a pseudonym of course, didn't get off to the best of starts - not because of the writing or the narrative style, but because of the silly editorial slips. Within the first few pages I had noted a 'passed' instead of 'past', the use of 'sixteen' and '16' in the same sentence, and a 'their' and 'there' left side by side, as if the incorrect one should have been edited out but wasn't. Later on, I even stumbled across an 'illicit' instead of 'elicit'. Really glaring mistakes, in other words. FORTUNATELY the actual content of the book was absorbing, interesting and funny enough to redeem it - hence the four stars.

One thing I really liked about Confessions is how 'everyday' this doctor's stories are. He's not an A+E doctor (though obviously there are one or two stories from his training days) or a surgeon, but a garden-variety GP, a man on the front line and the gateway to most NHS services. Rather than extreme cases, this book is more concerned with giving insight into the variety of presenting complaints made to a GP on a day-to-day basis and showing how much further a GP's role goes than we might realise. I reckon I'll be less inclined to grumble next time my doctor's running late, for example, because it's clear that not every problem can be tackled in ten minutes, and often the patients that cause appointments to run late are the most vulnerable and important of the day.

Of course, the most delightful moments in the book often stem from Daniels' stories of memorable patients, from the hilarious (an elderly lady's rectal exam had me in fits of laughter) to the tear-jerking (like when the hospital doctors conspired to reunite a lady who had been paralysed by a stroke with her beloved pet cat on her birthday, despite the strict ward rules). What I also really liked about this book was the fact that because it's written under a pseudonym, the doctor behind it is able to be brutally honest about various political and social issues he has come up against over the years. For example, he unleashes his contempt over a posh London yuppie who came in with a son suffering from a severe bout of measles. The boy had never been vaccinated against any of the horrific diseases that can affect children, because his mother was convinced that she could "boost his immune system naturally" with a whole food diet. As a reader, I was horrified at her naïvety - and Daniels was understandably even more so:

"I believe the one great achievement of modern medicine is the widespread vaccination of children. Vaccines are cheap, safe and have saved millions of lives both here and all over the world... There it was: measles... As a doctor who had only practised medicine in the twenty-first century, I should never have seen this disease... He can eat all the organic dates and wholemeal rice in the world, it won't give him immunity to measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria, tetanus, meningitis C, whooping cough, haemophilus influenza and tuberculosis... Not all children can have vaccines. They can be harmful to children who have diseases of their immune system such as HIV or those having chemotherapy for cancer. Previously, these children were protected because healthy children were all vaccinated and so a disease outbreak was prevented... Vaccinating isn't just about protecting your own child."

It is stories - and explanations - like this slotted alongside the funny anecdotes, bizarre patients and heartwarming moments that make the book so thought-provoking and elevate it beyond 'just another doctor memoir.' Daniels shares his thoughts on everything from a doctor's role in society, doctor-patient relationships, the cost of NHS treatment, privatisation and the differences between hospital and general practice work, to time wasters, sick note scroungers, drug addicts, government meddling, NHS targets and the way drug reps operate. Not only that, but he manages to do it in a way that is simultaneously funny and telling, pithy and insightful. In the end, despite those dreadful editorial mistakes, I really enjoyed this book, and might even keep hold of it to reread sometime. It made me think about certain elements of healthcare in a different way, and made me laugh out loud more than a few times... what more could I ask for? ( )