The Medicine

What happens when a doctor kills a patient? Are GPs overprescribing antidepressants? Does ‘female Viagra’ work? What role can psychedelics and cannabis play in treating pain? What is sickness, and how much of it is in our heads?

In The Medicine, Dr Karen Hitchcock takes us to the frontlines of everyday treatment, turning her acute gaze to everything from the flu season to dementia, plastic surgery to the humble sick day. In an overcrowded, underfunded medical system, she explores how more of us can be healthier, and how listening carefully to a patient’s experience can be as important as prescribing a pill. These dazzling essays show Hitchcock to be one of the most fearless and illuminating medical thinkers of our time – reasonable, insightful and deeply humane.

About the Author

Dr Karen Hitchcock is a general physician whose clinical work has focused on pain, fatigue, medically unexplained symptoms and obesity. She holds a PhD in English and writes regular essays for The Monthly. She is the author of the Quarterly Essay Dear Life and the story collection Little White Slips, which won the Steele Rudd award in the 2010 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards. Hitchcock was one of the first authorised prescribers of medicinal cannabis in Australia.