Welcome to Dr Phil’s site; not to to be confused with Oprah’s Dr Phil, who is much more famous but has much less hair.

General blogs appear below, more specialised medical stuff, such as Private Eye columns, NHS Inquiries, books, DVDs  and tour dates are on the fringes.  I thank you.

NEWS…. Bristol tour date just announced - October 31, Redgrave Theatre 8 PM – FFI http://lnk.ms/BQBN2
STIs on the increase (again). Time to invent a condom you can put on first time, the right way around, with less than five hands.

Phil Hammond is a GP, writer, broadcaster and possibly the only comedian to have appeared at a public inquiry. He is Private Eye’s medical correspondent and has appeared on Have I Got News for You, The News Quiz, The Now Show, The One Show and Countdown.

These action shots were taken in 1988, when glasses were riduclously big and babies were ridiculously slippery. If you think you might be one of them, please let me know.  You may be entitled to compensation.

“One of the most entertainingly subversive people on the planet” The Guardian

“Sceptical, irreverent, very funny and like a mighty gush of fresh air in a field that’s bedevilled with cover ups and cloaked in a vow of silence” Time Out

“Generates dozens of laughs and more ire than any amount of tentative taboo-breaching” The Financial Times

“In the long and brilliant tradition of comedy doctors” Sunday Times

“Funny, sensible and rude, like eating a penis-shaped vegetable” David Mitchell

NEXT GIG

Dr Phil’s Rude Health Show

September 15th
Leeds Carriageworks 0113 224 3801,

BYO interesting lump

NEWS: Oxford heart inquiry: read my response on the Private Eye tab. And isn’t it time we honoured Steve Bolsin? http://www.steve-bolsin.com/

Bristol Pathologiy Inquiry: Why have the whistleblowers received warnings that they may be criticised?

My toughest case: Baby Phil (The Independent, July 2010)

Early in my medical career, in-between stitching my glove onto the top of a man’s head and watching my spectacles fall into an open wound, I realised a career in surgery probably wasn’t for me. So I joined a GP training scheme and prepared for a life of therapeutic gossip and viral probability. But to get there, I still had to do two years of hospital jobs, starting with the most inappropriate one imaginable; 6 months on a special care baby unit.

It was the toughest time of my life, trying to put drips, drains, tubes and catheters in the tiniest of babies. Luckily, the nurses saw me coming and when it was quiet, we’d swap roles. They’d do all the high-tech fiddly stuff and I’d fetch the coffee and Hobnobs. But when it was busy, I’d be called into action. In 1988, the training mantra was ‘see one, do one, teach one’. As one consultant advised: ‘If you’re not sure what you’re doing, put on  a mask of relaxed brilliance.’ But no mask can calm the panic of a premature birth and dash to special care.

The baby was 32 weeks and not breathing. I looked around for sister. Sister was busy with another baby. I’d done six successful intubations (passing a tube into the trachea to allow ventilation) but never on my own. I chose a tube, I picked up the laryngoscope and prayed my glasses would stay on my sweaty nose long enough to get a good view of the vocal cords. I eased the tube in and fate directed it to the correct hole. As the tiny lungs inflated, Mum placed a lump of amethyst next to her baby ‘for the healing energy.’ An unlikely juxtaposition, even for the West Country.

Some babies get rapidly better, others rapidly worse, but this baby remained in limbo for weeks, unable to come off the ventilator but hanging in there. I’d take blood and fiddle with the ventilator, willing him to thrive with science, while Mum brought in a succession of totems. Healing beads, horse’s hair, homeopathic creams. Nothing either of us did seemed to work. Then one morning, she stuck a picture of the Pope on the incubator and went for a coffee.

Sleep deprivation does odd things to the mind, and for some reason I decided to fashion the Pope a Jimmy Saville wig out of a yellow X-ray form. Sister spotted it, just as Mum returned, whipped it off and turned it upside down. “What’s that?” asks Mum. “It’s Dr Phil’s lucky horseshoe. He made it especially.” From that miraculous moment, her baby picks up.  Within a week, he’s off the ventilator. Mum’s overwhelmed, Dad wants to name the baby after me and I’m presented me with an enormous box of chocolates.  I give them to sister, obviously. Baby Phil may have escaped special care, but I’ve still got 5 months to survive.

Learning from Brain Failure

What can the NHS learn for England’s footballing failure? Let’s pretend Fabio was leading a crack surgical team in a race to perform the world’s first brain transplant. It’s  stretching it to imagine John Terry holding a scalpel, at least in a surgical context, but  by the time the England team has got the patient on the trolley, the Germans have already performed two brain transplants and are pushing for a third. Where did it all go so wrong?

Let’s start with the theatre manager. I have enormous respect for Fabio Capello, at least I would do if I could understand him. Even when he’s speaking through an interpreter, I struggle to make sense of him so what 22 overpaid numpties make of it all is anybody’s guess. The more people fail to understand him, the angrier he gets, like Postman Pat’s psychotic Italian half-brother. You don’t want to upset him, for fear of finding a horse’s head in your bed, but you can’t help yourself because you don’t know what he wants.

Spanish TV rather unkindly hired someone to translate what Fabio shouts pitch-side, and aside from a lot of earthy abuse, there was an almost forlorn repetition of ‘Wayne? Wayne? Wayne?’ Much of the dugout discussion with Stuart ‘Psycho’ Pearce was an argument about whether Psycho should stand up and shout before Fabio, or whether Fabio should always been the first to stand up and shout.

If Fabio was in charge of an NHS operating theatre, there’d be carnage. We know that good communication is crucial to performance and after the disastrous case of German doctor Daniel Ubani, who killed a pensioner with an overdose of analgesia after confusing the drug names, there have been calls to ensure oversees doctors have a proper command of English before being allowed to work in the UK. Football may not kill anyone, but there’s an ugly association between England losing and domestic violence. European law currently prevents us enforcing language tests on European employees, although testing is compulsory for doctors and nurses from Australia and America where English is the first language.

Fabio can’t be entirely blamed for his team defending like the Keystone Kops on gripe water. Granted, we saw off the mighty Slovenia, a nation which boasts more brown bears than professional footballers. And probably brown beers. It was the surgical equivalent of a routine hernia repair in preparation for the biggest and most complex operation ever.  Germans succeed in football because they work as a team, and the same is true of surgery. In a good surgical team, there is no hierarchy. Everyone knows what they’re doing, anyone can raise a concern and checklists are used to ensure absolutely no stone is left unturned (or swab undiscovered).  England operated like a team of prima donna locums who’s hardly met, didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing and didn’t much care because they earned a much better living over the road at the BUPA Premier League hospital.

You could tell all was not well with England when John Terry tried to blow the whistle on team disharmony. I’m not sure whether the Public Interest Disclosure Act covers professional footballers, but it soon emerged that Terry hadn’t exhausted all the correct internal channels before taking his concerns to the media. Fabio’s door may always have been open but the last time Terry knocked on it, he was sacked for copping off with his registrar’s girlfriend, so you can understand his preference for public revenge.

Dysfunctional teams never deliver. Life is complex and to err is human, but if we don’t learn from our errors, we keep repeating them. It requires difficult conversations between skilled communicators to get out of a really big hole, and Fabio’s English simply wasn’t up to the task. The FA have given him time to learn but until he does, I wouldn’t let him anywhere near my brain.