The Complete Confessions of a GP by Benjamin Daniels

Author:Benjamin Daniels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Read on for some brand-new chapters from Dr Daniels …

Why do people get sick?

There was a tabloid article recently about a woman who lived to 103 years old and apparently she put her longevity down to never having had sex. Now this is clearly simply a silly tabloid article not meant to be taken too seriously, but it does illustrate the tendency we have to believe that things are as they are for a reason. Whether it is good health or illness, we seem to need to be able to explain it in terms of cause and affect in order to provide some meaning in our lives.

As a GP, I find this happens a lot to my patients as they try to rationalise the things that are happening to their bodies. For those of us lucky enough to take our health for granted, it can come as quite a shock when something goes wrong. This is where someone like me comes in. On a good day I’ll often be able to answer the ‘What is it?’ question and even sometimes help with the ‘What can I do about it?’ dilemma. But ‘Why has it happened to me?’ is usually the hardest question and I rarely offer a satisfactory response.

Religious patients will happily explain everything as an ‘Act of God’, but for those without strong spiritual beliefs, the search for meaning in their illness can be a lot more difficult to find. Sometimes our physical ailments clearly reflect how we have treated our bodies. We can’t dismiss the significance of diet, alcohol, smoking and stress, but although this may help explain the pre-Christmas migraine or even the lung cancer in the 40-a-day smoker, it offers no answers to the parents of a child who has just been diagnosed with leukaemia.

Some of my more new-age patients explain cancer and other severe illnesses with talk of negative energies and suppressed toxic emotions causing disease. No GP would argue that our emotional and physical health aren’t strongly linked, but to claim ‘suppressed emotions’ to be the sole influence on an illness as complex as cancer is offensive to all the good people who have suffered from it. Receiving a diagnosis of cancer is hard enough to deal with, without the unpleasant and bogus idea that someone’s suppressed psyche is in some way to blame.

My explanation for the majority of the illnesses I see is much duller. The causes of most medical problems are multiple. You might have a bit of arthritis in your knee for several reasons; you’re getting on a bit, you’re a bit overweight, it runs in your family but most importantly you’ve got a bad knee because shit happens. It’s not God’s will or bad energies, it’s just life and part of being a human. You’re probably reading this and understandably questioning my bedside manner. To the real people who come to me with genuine pains and fears, I promise that I offer more empathetic words than those I have just written.

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