The Medicine

Book excerpt: What happens when a doctor kills a patient? Are GPs overprescribing antidepressants? Does ‘female Viagra’ work? What role can psychedelics and cannabis play in treating pain? What is sickness, and how much of it is in our heads? In The Medicine, Dr Karen Hitchcock takes us to the frontlines of everyday treatment, turning her acute gaze to everything from the flu season to dementia, plastic surgery to the humble sick day. In an overcrowded, underfunded medical system, she explores how more of us can be healthier, and how listening carefully to a patient’s experience can be as important as prescribing a pill. These dazzling essays show Hitchcock to be one of the most fearless and illuminating medical thinkers of our time – reasonable, insightful and deeply humane. ‘The Medicine is elegantly and startlingly wise about the body and the mind, the miracles and limits of modern medicine, the way we live now and the ways we don't. Read it and you will look at yourself differently. Not only that - you'll look at your doctor differently.’ —Don Watson ‘Karen Hitchcock does some of the best writing in Australia’ —Leigh Sales