The walls in our surgery are pretty thin, which means usually I can hear a couple of other  consultations at the same time as mine. This is enlightening and entertaining in equal parts.

The other day, I heard another two GPs say in unison with me ‘and if it doesn’t get better, come back’. Which got me thinking: is it socially acceptable to say, at the end of your safety net, come back but please see someone else? Because it’s obviously what all of us were thinking.

Apparently general practice is ‘the art of managing uncertainty’. But if you tell that to someone who’s not a GP, it sounds a lot like the art of bollocking. How do you explain that what you’re actually saying is: ‘we didn’t get taught this at med school because there’s a 90% chance your symptom is crap and 10% chance it is a vague/rare presentation of something’ and leave them feeling reassured?

Worse still, the more minor the complaint the more people expect science to have solved it. In winter they look at you like: ‘It’s 2012 and you still haven’t cured the common cold? What the hell have you guys been doing?’ Instant access to GPs through daily emergency clinics compound this problem because there’s not even the opportunity for people’s symptoms to disappear whilst waiting to see you.

Example: the patient with miscellaneous pain that has been fully investigated and no cause found refuses to take any form of analgesia. Despite trying to explain how pain works, the standard response is: ‘Taking tablets is masking the underlying problem. I want the cause found. Everyone knows that if a dog keeps sniffing your breast you probably have cancer.’

She’s got a point – unless she’s talking about her husband.

Sigh. I blame Dawkins and the era of fundamental science. He’s created a bunch of devotees who are blind to the limitations of science, who think studies PROVE things irrefutably, who think that in 2012 there must be some technology that can find the cause of their problem, and who also think that they saw an image of the Big Bang in their piece of toast this morning.

This combined with the fact that philosophy students have given philosophy such a bad name means that everything nowadays is about answers.

So what do you do if you don’t have any? Obviously I don’t know – but I’m going with ‘book them in with your colleague’.