Dr Michael Banna

David Cameron’s seven-day opening scheme for GPs sounds like an excellent idea for patients, but I’m not convinced it is. I’d be lying if I said that I wanted to work weekends, but that is genuinely not my concern here — though it will be for many people who make up the bedrock of general practice. My concern is how we can possibly make it happen. General practice is currently on its knees. We are facing increasing demand from both patients and the government, and a steadily decreasing income which has resulted in practice closures and mergers. To top it off, we are in the middle of a recruitment crisis which has resulted in many practices being understaffed.

Obesity. Everyone’s talking about it. It’s bad. Gives you diabetes, heart disease, and it makes you fat. And if you’re a newspaper, the chief executive of NHS England will tell you that it renders healthcare professionals less capable of doing their jobs. ‘Fat docs ordered to slim by NHS Chief’ cried the Sun. I didn’t get the memo. He actually told the papers, not the people. But let’s forget about just how insulting that is. Let’s forget that obesity is part of a big lifestyle puzzle, and it’s activity and nutrition doctors should be promoting, not just weight loss. Let’s say he came to us with the suggestion that we should set an example to our patients by demonstrating the healthy lifestyles we advocate. Is that so bad?

Upon seeing the headline ‘Paracetamol does not help lower back pain’, I found myself emitting a small (well – actually quite a large) sigh. The image of queues of angry patients brandishing pitchforks and newspapers, demanding to know why I've been withholding ‘the good stuff’ and tricking them into taking pointless pills, came to my mind. I worry about health articles in the general press, particularly the transformation of clinical trials and evidence into headlines and soundbites; that the reader won’t necessarily read the whole article, or account for the limitations of the evidence, just taking home a simple one-liner: in this case, that paracetamol – arguably the most widely used painkiller in the country – is useless.