All doctors have the unusual opportunity of peering deep into the inner lives of their patients. In these riveting stories, award-winning GP, Laura Marshall-Andrews, recounts those moments in all their bizarre, comic and sometimes heart-wrenching beauty.

In so doing she fearlessly reveals the struggles of her profession and details how our health system has been broken by fragmentation, over-regulation and the blind dogma of ‘Evidence Based Medicine’. She shows how the factory-belt system has little space to allow or acknowledge the complexity of an individual’s life and she argues the need to value each patient’s unique story as being the key to their heath.

These stories demonstrate how humanity, belief and love, unquantifiable and beyond the reach of mass trial and hard evidence, are much more powerful motivators for good care and it is these that should be at the heart of all health-care decisions. 

At a time when the NHS has never been more needed or more beloved, this no-holds-barred account from a busy GP’s surgery at the NHS frontline is also a call for change.

Written and read by Dr Laura Marshall-Andrews.