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Doctors (Part 2)

Surgeons

There are more surgical specialties than you can shake a scalpel at. In order of decreasing IQ, they include:

Neurosurgeons, aka brain surgeons

Every young and ambitious schoolboy and schoolgirl dreams of becoming a neurosurgeon. It kind of makes sense that this group of doctors is the most intelligent, at least among the surgeons. They work on other people’s brains day in, day out, so it stands to reason they get to know what makes a really good brain tick and therefore...

A whole bunch of people work in NHS hospitals: doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, radiographers, phlebotomists, cardiology and respiratory technicians, cleaners, porters and hospital managers. I debated whether to include the managers on my list. Do they do anything that could reasonably be described as work? I decided to include them in the end for completeness. They do, after all, outnumber all the other groups put together. (That statement may not be strictly...

I will be posting a series of articles in this blog about hospital life soon. Entitled Who’s Who and What’s What: Inside NHS Hospitals, it's an insider's guide to how hospitals really work. The series will attempt to inform, explain and demystify what it is that doctors, nurses and all the other clinical specialists get up to behind your back if you're unlucky enough to be admitted to hospital.

Here are some of the topics I'll be covering...

Making sense of all the different medical and...

On 4 June 2020, the GMC (General Medical Council) wrote to inform me that it had erased my name from the UK register of medical practitioners and revoked my licence to practise. In other words, I had been struck off. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I had taken early retirement to escape the relentless pressure and stress of life on the NHS frontline as a consultant in anaesthesia and critical care medicine. After forty years, I was burnt out. The letter from the GMC marked the formal conclusion...