Would you trust your doctor with your life?

I found myself thinking the following today.

Do I trust my GP?

It was sparked by comments left on the Express website against the top story today that sleeping pills can kill you.

There is a proportion of the British public, and I should specify we are talking about NHS doctors here, who would answer "no" to this question.

Thankfully, I rarely have occasion to visit my doctor.

I am not ill that often, but more importantly I trust my own research and pharmaceutical background far more than I do the man or woman sitting opposite me with exactly eight minutes of NHS-funded minutes to spare. So I tend to self-medicate.

My experience of GPs comes in two capacities.

As a patient and as a pharmaceutical representative, a position I held for four years in a previous life.

I was often lost for words as I sat in various consulting rooms around London extolling the benefits of my drug to GPs, consultants and registrars.

Behind closed doors, when the patients back is turned, some of the things I saw and heard were nothing less than terrifying.

The role of a rep is to get doctors to prescribe drugs, and we are not selling timeshares here. These are licensed, researched medicines that have cost around £300 million to take from research to the market. And granted, they are not cheap.

But if they are going to give someone a better quality of life, or even save their life, money doesn’t come into it right? Wrong.

I peddled a new generation arthritis drug, the benefit -it was less likely to burn a hole in the patient’s stomach and cause a gastric bleed than the old style medicines.

The target patient group were the elderly and those with stomach problems as the effect of a bleed could be devastating, indeed fatal.

I once found myself drawn into an argument with a GP about it being cheaper to pay the hospital cost of a gastric bleed when it eventually happened than to upgrade elderly patients onto the new therapy.

The doctor justified himself saying maybe only one in 100 patients would have a bleed, a fatal bleed was less likely. It was better for his budget to run that risk than move all his patients onto the “safer” drug and attract a telling off from the PCT.

Another occasion, while selling a drug for overactive bladder disorders, a doctor refused to prescribe it because it was cheaper for the patient to wear pads and wet themselves.

They were already used to it anyway, and had never complained. Why rock the boat and end up with someone on an expensive drug when they are perfectly happy bunging themselves up and avoiding going out unless they absolutely have to.

The reason the patient had never complained, I imagine, is that people with bladder disorders are very often too embarrassed to discuss it with their doctor.

In fact many cases of depression cases can be pared down to an underlying bladder disorder - but if you only have eight minutes with the GP, maybe that’s not long enough to get comfortable enough to talk about your wetting problem.

Another doctor had not even heard of this medicine because she refused to see medical reps, so was unaware of any pharmaceutical advancements. The only reason I managed to speak to her was because the practice needed a drug company to pay for a lunch.

These are two examples from four years of horror stories I came across on a weekly basis.

Doctors falling asleep during consultations, one asked me once how to spell “asthma”. A couple were famous among the reps for taking pleasure in reducing new ones to tears when they called on them.

I never found that funny, these are after all sensitive professionals looking after our vulnerable population.

As a patient my experience has been sketchy.

I go to the GP only if I am fully armed with information about what I think I might have.

I know I am likely to be fobbed off with the cheapest, not the best drug, so I find out exactly what I need before I get to the consulting room.

A friend went to the her GP once with a burning ring of blisters around her middle, in excruciating pain and complaining of feeling feverish.

I am not a doctor, but instantly knew this was shingles.

She returned from her GP with a packet of paracetamol and dry skin cream.

I recommended she go back and ask for acyclovir cream and possibly an oral anti-viral preparation.

She returned that evening with both, and a message “the doctor said you were right”.

This is a frighting situation, especially as so many people, especially the elderly, go to their doctors putting their faith and their lives trustfully in their hands.

If I go to the doctor, I make sure I know more about my symptoms than they do.

I am also confident to ask for exactly what I need, and am not scared to hold out until I get it.

I think that is the safest way.

Do you trust your GP?