Phil Whitaker is a GP and director of a complementary medical centre. It said as much at the bottom of his review in The Guardian of Raymond Tallis's book, Hippocratic Oaths. As Tallis sees complementary medicine as one of the ‘enemies of progress’ — part of the ‘regressive temptation’ — it is not surprising that Whitaker is not fully at one with him. But at least we know where we stand.
Sir Donald Irvine, on the other hand, had nothing but his e-mail address at the bottom of his review in The Lancet. Tallis is not kind to the General Medical Council (GMC), and is frankly uncomplimentary about Irvine, who was its President during the GMC's turbulent times. Irvine is, one could say ‘in turn’, more than frank about his view of Tallis.
Now, that is the best purpose of book reviews. It would be a boring old world if books were handed only to one's friends, for them to pat you on the back so you could, in due time, return the compliment. Or if book reviews did nothing more than list the contents, worry about the way some of the illustrations had reproduced, and find a couple of hanging participles. But I would have felt easier if Sir Donald had let slip somewhere that, in a book subtitled, ‘medicine and its discontents’, he himself was one of Tallis's causes of discontent. Irvine's ‘evolution of a patient-centred culture of professionalism’ simply does not fit with Tallis's thesis.
Stuart Derbyshire, described as assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, wrote the BMJ's review. For me, it was the best review — in other words, it reflected my own view. Tallis, says Irvine, thinks that most of ‘the ills of medicine today … are beyond the responsibility of doctors’. Not just that — they are also largely beyond their control. Derbyshire wonders how doctors have ‘provided so little resistance to the multitude of attacks against their profession’. I venture that it is partly due to powerful doctor–politicians, such as Irvine, if only because they took the stand: ‘If we don't do it, they'll do it for us’. If I take issue with Tallis, it is that he is too uncritical of evidence-based medicine, and completely uncritical of clinical governance — the latter, in my view, being the prime example of ‘if we don't…’.
Not that any of this matters: not only did Bush gain a second term; he won the popular vote.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2004.