The Medicine: A Doctor's Notes

by Karen Hitchcock

What happens when a doctor kills a patient? Are GPs overprescribing antidepressants? Does ‘female Viagra’ work? What role can psychedelics and cannabis play in treating pain? What is sickness, and how much of it is in our heads?

In The Medicine, Dr Karen Hitchcock takes us to the frontlines of everyday treatment, turning her acute gaze to everything from the flu season to dementia, plastic surgery to the humble sick day. In an overcrowded, underfunded medical system, she explores how more of us can be healthier, and how listening carefully to a patient’s experience can be as important as prescribing a pill. These dazzling essays show Hitchcock to be one of the most fearless and illuminating medical thinkers of our time – reasonable, insightful and deeply humane.

‘The Medicine is elegantly and startlingly wise about the body and the mind, the miracles and limits of modern medicine, the way we live now and the ways we don't. Read it and you will look at yourself differently. Not only that - you'll look at your doctor differently.’ —Don Watson

‘Karen Hitchcock does some of the best writing in Australia’ —Leigh Sales

Genres: Nonfiction, Medicine, Essays

340 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 4, 2020

About the author

Karen Hitchcock is the author of the award-winning short-story collection Little White Slips and Dear Life: On caring for the elderly (Quarterly Essay 57) and a regular contributor to the Monthly. She is a staff physician in acute and general medicine at a large city public hospital, and has a PhD in English and creative writing.

Reviews

[Paul Large · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a great read, practical and insightful.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Verrrrry interesting. Pulls no punches.

[Marles Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would like to meet Karen Hitchcock. A fabulous general physician with very honest experiences in the health system and all its tributaries. 'The Medicine: the Doctor's Notes' reflected the four main ethical principles in the practice of medicine: respect for autonomy of decision making of both patients and doctors, the moral obligation to act for the benefit of others, acting in non-maleficence (primum non nocere), and acting equitably with justice. This book, these musings, these reflections, the power of her words; I read this book in one sitting, and it made me reflect the ethical responsibility of our health professionals, and question the ethical responsibility to the self. Do we need to start thinking of ourselves objectively (or even in the third person) to question whether what we are actually doing to ourselves is right?
Karen asks ''what doesn't make us sick?' Have we stopped questioning the function of illnesses in the context of the human as a complex entity? Have we really created new illnesses and syndromes because we have spiralled out of control in our stress-filled, fast-paced lives where it's easier to call our symptoms something else them for what they really are? This was a wake-up for me. And in the current toilet-paper hoarding crisis, it is a book to bring things down to earth (just a little).

This book also surprised me and my connection to that particular Polish family's Mexican cactus garden with white stones that Karen wrote about from her childhood. Small world.

[Jenny Esots · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perceptive writing on the ethical issues of our times: drugs, obesity, mental health and epidemics in the making. I couldn't put this book down. This is despite having read some of the articles before via The Monthly. I note Karen Hitchcock thanks Helen Garner in the acknowledgements, both writers explore issues within the mundanities of life. Here are the big issues in life with all the day to day concerns and pressures colliding.
Greedily I can't wait for the next installment.

[Jocelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turned out I had read most of these as columns in The Monthly. They were well worth re-reading, but the cumulative effect was different when all read together (possibly too fast)

[Steph · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays and columns from The Monthly magazine, but that wasn’t clear from the introduction, it’s just written in small print on the copyright page. Because of that lack of clarity, I was expecting chapters that built on each other, but they didn’t really, sometimes ending before I was sure what they key contention was. Other points seemed contradictory or confusing, for example she says that fibromyalgia doesn’t exist but also that cannabis is effective in treating it; she says neuroplasticity treatments are too much work for patients but it’s unclear if she means the treatments are ineffective for most or if she thinks most patients are lazy (and in either case, what the preferred solution is).

My favourite bit is that she mentions Guillain-Barre syndrome (three times!), a rare and dangerous illness I had and have spent the last three years awkwardly explaining to people, so it’s validating to come across someone who finally knows what I’m talking about.

There are lots of interesting anecdotes and ideas but I felt like as a book this needed more editing, further clarifying and building on the strongest concepts while ditching the fluffier bits in between. Maybe this is better read as something to flick through rather than cover-to-cover.

[Karen Chau · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s quite nice to see accessible medical writing produced by a trained doctor, complemented by a good perspective about the social nature of implementing health policy. It’s interspersed with anecdotes about the author’s experiences working in the Australian public health system, and it’s all quite punchy and engaging writing.

Some may find the straightforward voice of the author a bit of adjustment - I found this to be the case for myself but it’s quite worth it to stick through the whole book. It’s not the longest read but I found that I learnt quite a bit even on topics that I had read about previously, such as drug legalisation.

[Chelsea R.H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyable book, I was just annoyed that it didn't have anything in the way of citations, bibliography or references. But overall, really interesting and I liked the little peek into the lives of hospital doctors that we never really get to see.

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An honest opinion on medicine and healthcare in Australia!

[Bill Porter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Karen get get mildly annoying at times, but given the issues she has had to endure, she is quite entitled. An illuminating read.