My dad is a GP so this was a pretty funny read that was close to my heart. However, there were some bits- and a lot of people on here seem to agree where the writer was a bit callous about certain diagnoses and about female nurses and doctors. And let's not to forget the instruction that if you want to keep your GPs interest; "Be Attractive." It kind of ruined the read for me a little bit because the rest of it was pretty amusing and I guess if you're less sensitive about certain issues then this book could be five stars but it was a bit hit and miss for me.

 

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Last week I posted a review of Hospital Babylon, the story of one day in an English A&E Department, which I really enjoyed. Because I enjoyed it so much I went through my books on search for something similar, and stumbled across Confessions of a GP, which I picked up a couple of years ago. I was interested in reading a book from the perspective of a General Practitioner, because it promised to be more intimate and perhaps more focused on specific patients and scenarios.

However, Confessions of a GP is more a series of vignettes across the career of Benjamin Daniels, both as a GP and as a doctor in training in a hospital setting. Several of the stories were sad, others almost funny, but the vast majority came across to me as being rather condescending.

I'm sure that as a GP, Benjamin Daniels has more than his fair share of frustrations with people - from those that treat their doctor like a get-out-of-work-free card, or take up their time with seemingly inane problems with unrealistic expectations of what their GP can do for them. But as a book, it's rather disappointing, and his overall attitude comes across as knowing more than the average person, which in some cases is perhaps true, but left me more than a little disappointed.

The only character that consistently appears throughout the book is Benjamin himself, and as he is a locum GP, rather than having a permanent practice, there's not even the relief of having a receptionist or nurse play any type of recurring role. And seeing as I liked him less and less as the book progressed, my enthusiasm for his stories lessened too.

Perhaps I'm being a little unfair because I'm comparing Confessions to an almost similar book, but surely writing about real people with a little more compassion isn't such a big ask. There were a handful of patients that I was interested in their outcomes, but Daniels was so negative that it also started to rub off on me and I just stopped caring.

I really can't recommend this book to anyone, even if you are interested in medical non-fiction. It was just one man's whinging rant, and I just didn't buy into it at all.

Enjoyable, funny and at times sad. Learned a lot.

I do like a good, reality-based laugh and whilst not explicitly marketed as humour, with a blurb stating the book is very funny and when linked with books such as Trust Me, I’m a (Junior) Doctor, the reader would be justified in expecting a good few laughs. Unfortunately this is where the book was disappointing, there were a few humorous stories, a patient having pornographic dreams about Tom Jones, to name one, but there was an overall lack of humour. Perhaps my expectations were unrealistic, but this book is distinctly less funny than other examples of the genre.What was refreshingly different about Confessions of a GP there was less angry ranting than similar books, although it still exposed the short falls of the system. Dr Daniels himself comes off more a someone who is frustrated with a system that he sees is failing his patients and not sticking the NHS ethos, rather than an man who is opinionated just for the sake of it.Overall, whilst I did find the book a bit of a let down in terms of humour, it did give an accurate, non-ranting look at the life of a modern GP and was enjoyable to read.