The book, Are You the F**king Doctor?: Tales from the bleeding edge of medicine, contains a selection of Dr Farrell’s best work from his columns, blogs and short stories.
Dr Farrell said the book was ‘more than a collection of stand-alone anecdotes and whimsical reflections’, adding that he hoped it provided ‘a compelling chronicle of the daily struggles – and personal costs – of being a doctor at the coalface’.
The first chapter provides a brutal description of his experiences as a morphine addict.
Dr Farrell said he had published the book because 'although the columns were all separate and distinct, together they chronicled the increasing impossibility of general practice, and the cognitive dissonance of having high expectations of family doctors yet being unwilling to resource them.'
Dr Farrell was a family doctor on the Irish border and a columnist for GP magazine and GPonline for nearly 20 years. He was also a BMJ columnist for 20 years. In 2005, while writing for GP he became the first doctor to win Columnist of the Year in the Periodical Publishers Association awards.
He has also been a columnist for the Lancet, the Journal of General Practice, the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish News. He wrote the entry on sex for The Oxford Companion to the Body and he curates #Irishmed on Twitter, a weekly global ‘tweetchat’ on all medical issues.
Read one of Dr Farrell's GP columns that is included in the book here.
- You can buy a Dr Farrell's book from Amazon here.
