We trust our doctors. Polls tell us that we have greater faith in them than in most other professionals (including politicians and journalists, of course). How many of us have experienced a wave of relief in the consulting room, face to face with a calm but caring GP? Doctors Dissected, by the psychotherapist Jane Haynes and GP Martin Scurr should come with a health warning: read this book and you may never feel the same way about your doctor again.

Of course, we know that doctors are human beings like everybody else. But those selected for this book of highly personal interviews appear to be more damaged by life than most of us and sometimes even in need of help. Some have been traumatised by their own upbringing and several talk of their parents not understanding them. But most perturbing of all is the anxiety many of these doctors have about their own medical conditions and the very procedures they would urge on us. “I would be terrified of having an anaesthetic. I’d hate it,” says – yes – an aspiring anaesthetist. Another had to undergo an operation and threw a fit when she realised the anaesthetist was going to be someone who had trained with her not very long ago. The consultant had to step in instead. Is one doctor Haynes talks to a hypochondriac? “Oh, I am too frightened to go to the doctor,” comes the reply, “but I believe in my symptoms 100%.”

Haynes the psychotherapist dives into her subjects’ formative influences and early troubles. Her first interviewee is Martin Scurr, the joint author, who contributes some fascinating chapters about his own practice and medicine in general. Scurr (who writes a column for the Daily Mail) comes across as a doctor of the old school. Surely he must wear a bow tie. He was educated at the Catholic boarding school Stonyhurst, graduating from Westminster medical school in 1973. His father, an anaesthetist, who has dementia and dies before the end of the book, is frequently criticised by Scurr for failing to show any emotion or take any interest in him. “He never talked to me about anything, ever. I call him aspergoid; there is no warmth in him,” says Scurr, who has three ex‑wives and two sons to whom he is evidently close. Other doctors, identified by just their first names, have also had difficult relationships with their families. A chapter entitled “You have to deserve a father’s love” features Rachel, a GP whose father was celebrated pathologist and who endured years of treatment for a deformed spine, including major surgery, as a child. She says she “lived under the shadow of his brilliance” and “always felt like a complete failure”.

But this is a very particular group of interviewees – most are in private practice, which means this cannot be considered a representative selection, as the vast majority of doctors work predominantly in the NHS. A recurrent theme is frustration with the bureaucracy and pressures of the NHS, with Scurr and Haynes both harking back to a golden age.

This is balanced, to some extent, by the interviews with Cosmo, Scurr’s son, a trainee anaesthetist and the only one of Haynes’s subjects to speak of the pressures on the NHS rather than those on individual doctors. Cosmo does not criticise his father or the other private practitioners, but he puts the counter-argument very well.

“We would all like more time to look after our patients. It would be easier and you could do more, and when you do more you get more job satisfaction because the patient in front of you feels better because they have had more of your time. It is quite common for people to say, ‘I want more time and I cannot look after my patients properly in the NHS so I am leaving.’ But who is that really for? They are not really doing it for the patient. It is for them.”

If there is a gulf between the politics of Haynes and Scurr and that of the authors of NHS for Sale, there is also some common ground – that the health service does not have anything like the resources it needs. But the take-no-prisoners tone of Jacky Davis, John Lister and David Wrigley is a million miles from the chatty hotch-potch that is Doctors Dissected. These three doctors are activists and either founders or core members of the campaigning group Keep Our NHS Public. Their book is political, timed for the election. It is a denunciation, mostly of the Tory handling of the NHS, with added scorn for the role of the Liberal Democrats, but also of Labour’s legacy. This is soapbox stuff, in which politicians – most often Andrew Lansley but also Jeremy Hunt and David Cameron – are accused of deliberately deceiving the general public.

It will appeal to those who already believe that our coalition government is intent on wholescale privatisation of the NHS. Others may pull back from its tub-thumping certainties, even if they, too, are anxious about the direction of travel. The detailed account of the genesis and problems of the Health and Social Care Act that Lansley introduced in 2012, in the face of Cameron’s assertions that there would be “no more of the tiresome, meddlesome, top-down restructures that have dominated the last decade of the NHS”, is good and the detail of the private contracts that have been agreed – often, as in the case of Hinchingbrooke hospital, with disastrous consequences – is useful. But the negativity of the book is hard to take – the generally respected King’s Fund thinktank gets lambasted almost as much as management consultants McKinsey and it has little time for NHS chief executive Simon Stevens, who actually appears to have got political commitment for more NHS money ahead of the election. Because he used to head the private UnitedHealth in the US, he is viewed as suspect.

While warnings about privatisation need to be heard, the book takes no real account of the pressures on every health service in the world today. The number of elderly people needing health and social care is outstripping every country’s ability to cope, and expectations have soared as treatments have improved. More money is most definitely needed and top-down change is a disaster – that much is true. Reconfiguration is a dirty word in this book, but the NHS, just like every other health service, surely needs to evolve to meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s patients.

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