GP specialism

Hi,


A very quick, and late, update this week. I spent the weekend in Paris at a student sports competition, which was a lot of fun, but has shifted everything along a bit, meaning I now have lots of work for my essays, and late revision to get on top of. It might not have been the best idea going, with regards to my studies, but was so much fun, our team did well, and a good 'last chance' at some university sport before I am not a student any more! As long as I still pass my finals it is definitely worth it!

The last week has been a bit of a mish-mash to be honest. I am still on my GP rotation, and have done a number of different things this week, as well as the 'standard' consultations with patients. The most exciting of these was spending some time with one of the GP partners who ran a substance misuse service. As the GP surgery is in a very rural area, the people who are addicted to substances such as heroin cannot get to city centres every day or week, so the treatments such as methadone are prescribed and given here. This lead to a number of interesting conversations and some very exciting characters; all made more exciting by the fact that this GP's partners hated these patients and refused to have anything to do with the clinic. Being in a relatively well off rural area, the GPs and the patients didn't seem to have much in common with these 'drug addicts', though the patients did say that they were more than used to getting 'snooty looks'... One of them had replaced his heroin addiction with the gym, and exercised for 3 hours every single day - meaning he looked very healthy indeed. He said 'I am a  addictive person, I need to be addicted to something. Much better that it is exercise than heroin'. 

I love that, as a GP, you can do so much. I also spent some time in an ENT surgery run by one of the other GPs this week, where he was performing minor procedures on ears. If you want, you have a lot of scope for specialisation as a general practitioner. I don't think I would mind working in that sort of environment at all, as long as I had the options to specialise in things that interested me. It would make seeing the endless colds and ear infections much more bearable!