The real reason GPs are grumpy: the robots are coming for them

There’s something wrong with the relationship between patients and their GPs. I’ve spent much of this winter in my local surgery, what with one thing and another, sitting among the stoic and snivelling, drifting between different doctors. They’re pleasant, if perfunctory, but with each visit I became more sure that something fundamental is awry.

The docs seem ill at ease, as if their collective nose is out of joint, and I don’t think it’s overstretching or underfunding that’s the problem. My unprofessional diagnosis is that there’s a change under way in the balance of power between patients and medics; the status of GP as unimpeachable oracle is under threat, he feels the first tremors of what may be a seismic shift, and he doesn’t like it.

For more than half a century, since Christianity first faded from public life, GPs have been our secular high priests. They’re the guardians of birth and death, the purveyors of pills, and we’ve hung on their every word. Now, thanks to the internet and apps testing heart rate, fat and fitness, we’ve all become de facto quacks. At night, by the light of a touchscreen, we scroll through the latest medical guidance, and the doctor no longer seems like a miracle man.

Take my own experience. I’ve always secretly enjoyed a visit to the doctor. I like the rituals, pulse-taking and blood pressure. I like the pebble cool of a stethoscope and the superior sing-song way a GP says: ‘Breathe in … and breathe out.’ I’m a doctor-pleaser, the very model of a deferential patient, except that these days I often know more about my own long-term ailments than the GP, and I sometimes can’t help but mention it (in a tentative and respectful way) when the doc’s out of date.