Tony Copperfield's Primary Care Scream

I mostly gave up reading the general practitioner trade magazines some years ago. Reading them was like having an endlessly pessimistic friend following you around, whispering in your ear all the time. I would alternate between impotent rage and mute depression. Now that they go into the bin, I no longer feel the entire world is against me, and I've stopped having the injections. The exception, which I always read, is Tony Copperfield's splenic rant in Doctor magazine against all that is wrong with being a doctor in general, and a GP in particular.

Figure 1.

Butterworth-Heinemann, £17.99, pp 248 plus CD Rom ISBN 0 7506 8793 2 www.elsevierhealth.com

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

For a while I did wonder if Tony might be my doppelganger. He seemed to have attended the same farcical management meetings as me, in which banal “mission statements,” entirely devoid of use or content, were endlessly (“inclusively”) debated. He was obviously there on that out of hours home visit to one of the “lumpen proletariat at the shallow end of the gene pool.” He was at my shoulder when I “knelt in the pool of vomit, by the fag burnt sofa, illuminated only by the light from the satellite decoder and a rerun of Peak Practice.”

Not only did he seem to follow me around, but he also seemed to read my thoughts. Otherwise how did he know what I was thinking when I got that nice private consultant's letter about the “delightful” patient telling me that, surprisingly, her whole body, multisytem pan-investogram was normal.

Tony's targets are not just the “clinical governance gestapo” (with their “patronising bullshit”), academics pontificating on one clinic a month (“until you've felt your feet stick to a hallway carpet you can't call yourself a frontline medic”), nurses (“they must learn to suppress their desire to cover their own arses”), and patients. GPs also earn his ire. As he stingingly points out: “Nobody with their eyes open could deny that there are plenty of pretty iffy GPs out there.”

Tony inhabits a world that lies in that hinterland between the real and the surreal. That it is so startlingly familiar to us is testament to the ludicrous nature of our work. We see his characters every day. Ms Stargazer, the vegetarian urban road warrior who brings her unvaccinated children Moon Calf and Poppy Seed for homoeopathic treatment, may be a fictional character—but only just.

Tony Copperfield is quite simply fantastic. He is unbelievably funny and, strangely, he is also extraordinarily and improbably wise. He cuts, searingly, through the sanctimonious dishonesty that so often pollutes healthcare politics (“I once sank so low that I used the word `autonomy' without irony”). Most importantly, everything he writes is truer than fact.

My only fear is that, if the wind changes while I'm reading this book, I may end up looking like Kingsley Amis and sounding like Auberon Waugh. But hey, as Tony says, sometimes shit happens.