Just to clarify two things because I see people mixing them up in the thread:
a "GP" is someone who finished, after being qualified as a doctor, specialist training in what some countries call "family medicine" and others "general pratice" - a "GP" in England is not someone straight out of a medical degree + the "foundation years" (in the UK, two years working under supervision). After the training in family medicine / general practice that lasts 3-4 years, one is called a "General Practitioner" and for instance can diagnose health, they know a little of everything
a "specialist" is someone who after the two "foundation years" went through specialist training in something like cardiology or neurology etc. They know a lot about one thing but very little, in comparison, about the rest
just checked and as from Sept. 2019 he is on the GP register, which is very scary.
a registered practice doesn't mean, in the UK, actually having his own office and sitting there and having patients. A practice can be registered only for house calls or one can rent a fully equipped office for say 1 hour every two weeks and have the "practice" registered there
a "NHS doctor" can be:
a doctor who just registered with the NHS in order to be able to prescribe, even medicine which is NOT paid for by the NHS, but he still wants to have NHS prescription pads;
or a doctor even working 100% private that still wants to be able to prescribe medicine that the patients don't need to pay for (somehow patients are OK with paying say £100 for a private psychiatric consultation but not OK paying for the pills £10 instead of £2 when after said consultation they get a prescription for something)
a doctor in specialist or GP training, who is trained in a NHS-funded hospital and gets paid by the NHS and his prescriptions, written in the hospital, are NHS-paid-for
When people need weird prescriptions and this crazy doctor is writing them, he can do that. Unfortunately if he just writes 100% private prescriptions with no refunds there is much less checking than NHS paid-for-medicine, even if he's writing hormones etc.
Also people confuse a real, properly qualified GP with a doctor who isn't one because they think the non-qualified doctor is doing "general practice" and most people don't know the difference.
How he's still registered idk, because people get in trouble with the GMC for less. He's walking on thin ice because all it takes is *one* to get from him "online medical advice" and report him. There is a GMC code of ethics and it looks like he's breaking it.
He'll probably fail his revalidation test and will no longer be able to practise. I hope the GMC does something because he really puts doctors in a bad name. But this is the same GMC that gets doctors in trouble for writing iron tablets for their children because one "should not prescribe for family and friends" and wants paediatricians to go to out-of-hours GPs on say Saturday evening to get iron tablets. The GMC is a bag of wonders.
@Buster O'Keefe - the idiot uses first names because that's hospital talk. That's how some referrals are written now ("Jane only slept two hours a day. Jane had a history of being bipolar and the children reported that Jane had been manic for two weeks.) btw the guidelines say "ask people first how they prefer to be called" so I hope one day someone says "doctor, we were not in school, don't be condescending" and hello GMC this one is rude, insulting and unstable
@Real Mutha For Ya : it would be very nice if someone reported him to The Sun and the GMC did something. If you are a doctor, you don't want to have patients thinking you might be someone like him. If you are a patient, you don't want someone like him going around prescribing things. Because say you have no idea and you look for a GP and you tell this one "I feel guilty because I look at KF and can't sleep", this one will say "yes and you should feel guilty, cissing is a crime and you should know that just because you have a dick you are not necessarily a man, here is an antipsychotic, come here twice a week so I can brainwash you" instead of "nothing to feel guilty about, it's normal to find people funny but if you can't sleep perhaps try going to bed and looking at the website in the morning? or is there anything else that worries you"?
Anyway he pisses me off because then proper doctors have to undo the damage he is doing by saying rubbish and they will spend their (finite) time dealing with this.
