Barney's Reviews > This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor

I was expecting I'd enjoy this book but I ended up really disliking it. It starts off well with a few funny anecdotes but after a while I realised a lot of them are at the expense of the patient themselves. Yes I am the fun police, and I know humour is a way of coping, but there's something about the thought of a group of doctors chuckling about the time a dementia patient sexually assaulted another patient - and then a group of readers reading that and also chuckling - which doesn't sit well with me.

Also we can all agree that doctors deserve absolutely every penny they get and are entitled to far more than they're being paid currently. But there's nothing like someone pre-financial crash describing themselves as poor while also having just bought an apartment and a trip to the Mauritius which just aaaargh really gets under my skin.

I couldn't finish the book in the end. I was about half way through and fading fast, only to come across an vignette about the doctor being called in to deliver a new-born 'mid-wank', which ends with him completing the procedure "still erect". It was genuinely the most horrifying sentence I have ever read.

So yeah, 2 stars but mostly because (even though the book isn't really political itself) its popularity in the UK has contributed to conversations about how hard junior doctors work and how valuable their contributions are to the NHS.