TY - JOUR T1 - The doctors they deserve JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 795 LP - 795 VL - 54 IS - 507 AU - Mike Fitzpatrick Y1 - 2004/10/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/54/507/795.abstract N2 - ‘Societies get the doctors they deserve’ writes Raymond Tallis in Hippocratic Oaths, his important new analysis of ‘medicine and its discontents’.1 As an experienced clinician — he is professor of geriatric medicine at Manchester — Tallis is intimately familiar with the realities of contemporary medical practice in Britain. As the author of a number of critiques of fashionable irrational philosophies (such as postmodernism), he is well qualified to appraise the bleak ideology currently permeating the National Health Service.2 He offers an acerbic assessment of the current crisis of the medical profession.Over the past 20 years, doctors have been disparaged as paternalistic and authoritarian. In common with other professions, their claims of commitment to public service have been dismissed as a disguise for venal self-interest, and their professional organisations exposed as monopolistic cartels against the consumer.3 Under New Labour, in … ER -