Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Karen Hitchcock, Black Inc., $29.99.
Medical doctor and award-winning author Karen Hitchcock takes us to the frontline of everyday treatment.
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. Her sharp gaze turns to everything from the flu season to dementia, plastic surgery to the humble sick day.
Dr Hitchcock is a general physician whose clinical work has focused on discomfort, exhaustion, medically unexplained symptoms and obesity.
The Medicine offers a doctor’s insights into the healthcare system, health conditions, and people’s journeys through ill health and treatment in Australia. The compelling essays stretch over a lot of ground, from aged care to acute care, and from the personal to the systemic.
Hitchcock writes about her experiences first as a medical student and then as a doctor, and shares her perspectives on some of the most interesting and complex health issues and challenges of our times.
She is straight thinking, sympathetic, witty, practical and reasonable. Karen comes across as unwilling to make concessions, empathetic and impartial.
She is also a considerate person. “The minute I was accepted into medical school I became, in the eyes of my friends and family, a professor of every clinical specialty, with a sideline in veterinary medicine. The calls started almost immediately. Overnight, I transformed into that respected (if occasionally lethal) person in the medieval village who had no training but was somehow the one everybody went to for treatment and counsel. I had a new authority I hadn’t earned, didn’t want and (despite anxious protestation) couldn’t negate. After I graduated it became harder to cry complete ignorance…”
No wonder she has been described as “one of the most fearless and illuminating medical thinkers of our time — reasonable, insightful and deeply humane”.
