Undoctored
The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients
Adam Kay
“Now, Adam Kay returns and will once again have you in stitches in his painfully funny and startlingly powerful follow-up, Undoctored: The Story of a Medic Who Ran Out of Patients. In his most honest and incisive book yet, he reflects on what’s happened since hanging up his scrubs and examines a life inextricably bound up with medicine. Battered and bruised from his time on the NHS frontline, Kay looks back, moves forwards and opens up some old wounds.”
The title of this book is misleading. It suggests that Dr Kay literally ran out of patients, and mislead me into believing that this book was going to tell me how it happened! Instead, it’s a chronocle of sorts about his life after leaving medicine with a few bits of past-medical scenarios thrown in. I found it unsurprising that the medical system in the UK is just as broken for training doctors as Australia!
I read this book in a little under 3 hours – there wasn’t too much there that took me time to digest and contemplate. I felt that the humour felt crude to me and I wouldn’t read his other books for that reason. I think it is a loss to medicine that he gave up medicine – all those years of training and money put into it. I confess that I just don’t find a comedian to be as personally valuable to me as a doctor.
I’m not saying that Dr Kay’s experience should be overlooked or isn’t as valid as someone else’s trauma. However I didn’t find the book particularly funny or insightful. I’ve been blessed by some excellent non-fiction lately in this genre, and this book in comparison felt a bit cheap and left me undewhelmed. I definitely felt that I’d wasted my time and not gotten anything out of it.
This book is going to be best for someone with a British sense of humour and who has read the past books by Dr Kay. It’s not for me, and I think that Australians have far better sources of medical memiors at home.
Hachette | 13 September 2022 | AU$32.99 | paperback
How can someone so bright, be so dumb? If you are smart enough to get into medical school, surely you are smart enough to realise that military retaliation isn’t actually a bright idea most of the time. I understand the incredible and exciting challenge that you need to undertake to get into the special forces, but at the same time uh, isn’t creating long term medical problems like a bung knee a problem? It seems like a bit of a boys’ club, and that was always going to put my back up.
I didn’t really expect to enjoy this book, but Dr Palipana brings a hint of humour into everything. You’d think reading a book about someone who lost almost all his physical abilities would be quite depressing. Instead, this book is a tribute to the author’s resiliance and persistance. To some extent, it also exposes some of the negative aspects of living across different countries and having family that you aren’t sure how to work with.
Hmm, this was an interesting book, but not an outstanding one. While it was interesting to see the way that Ben-as-a-patient affected Ben-as-a-medical-student, it wasn’t anything particularly new to me. I also already had some pretty in-depth knowledge about how broken the medical system is in Australia.
Nurses work bloody hard. Every novel, every book I read, I know that nurses work very hard for sometimes very little reward. My mother was a nurse in aged care and I understood how hard it was for her to deal with patients dying every shift. For Anna to be able to keep her head above water and to keep working as a midwife even with all the avoidable deaths is amazing all by itself.