The heart sink doctor

Every Friday morning our department has an academic meeting, lasting an hour. They are a highlight of the week. Occasionally we have a “round the room” session, where each of the consultants spends a few minutes discussing how they approach a particular patient group—men with erectile dysfunction, for example, or women who have had recurrent urinary tract infections.

This week the subject was our experiences with what has been termed the heart sink patient. Each of us was supposed to talk about cases that we’ve found difficult, whether it was a patient with a particularly challenging condition or a puzzling set of symptoms, likely to be organic in origin. It’s those cases that cause the doctor to hold their head in their hands while …