A Maturing GP’s Blog

40 years, 400,000 consults, 1000s of cumulative hours examining people with a seemingly endless array of ailments and frailties, slowly turns experience and knowledge into hard-won (sometimes I think resisted) wisdom.

I am Dr John Samuel Cook, a Family Practitioner who is nearing the end of his navigation of the ever-changing medical system in New Zealand.

I would like to share my knowledge and ideas regarding what I believe to be the drivers of the diseases challenging ourselves and our health system. Current knowledge that lies outside my tightly controlled orthodox medical world is not readily available for interpretation by those seeking alternative pathways to manage health.

The ever-developing access to medical information – be it validated by traditional medical methods or just plain wacky stuff paraded in front of me by earnest folk wanting a cure – is a challenge for me, their doctor, with whom they have chosen to walk the medical pathway.

I was initially trained over 40 years ago at the very reputable Otago Medical School in New Zealand, with my knowledge being tweaked along the way partly by choice and partly by our Ministry of Health. In those early years, it almost (but not quite) dawned on me to gain information outside of the usual conduits and at one stage in the 1990s I even considered ‘that nutrition may have been a factor in the causation of disease’.