Doctor, My Cat Has IBS: Revisiting the Resilient GP

There are some documents that age like milk, others like wine. The infamous 2015 “Inappropriate Demands on GPs” article by Resilient GP does a bit of both.

Originally published on a grassroots GP platform, the article was a crowdsourced catalogue of the odd, the trivial, the maddening, and the absurd consultations UK GPs reported fielding from patients.

At the time, it exploded across online GP groups with a weird cocktail of catharsis, dark humour, and controversy. It was praised by exhausted doctors for “finally saying what we’re all thinking”—and just as quickly denounced by patient advocates and parts of the medical establishment for being unkind, unprofessional, and tone-deaf.

Then it was quietly taken down. It’s still available via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine if you’re savvy but I won’t link it for reasons that will become obvious.

The article’s themes didn’t disappear. If anything, they’ve only grown sharper in the years since, particularly under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic, the burnout crisis, and the post-pandemic collapse in trust, access, and morale across UK primary care.

A Product of Its Time: Burnout, Bewilderment, and Boundaries

In 2015, the NHS was already creaking under the weight of underfunding, increasing chronic disease, and a rising tide of bureaucracy. But general practice, in particular, was reaching a breaking point. The combination of unlimited demand and limited time was creating an unsustainable pressure cooker.

GPs were already seeing 50–60 patients a day, often with complex multi-morbidity, and then being asked to field requests for notes about bunk beds, anti-ageing cream, or “please convince my 6-year-old to go to Eton.”

To the average person, this might read as farce. To a GP at the end of a 13-hour day with a bladder like a balloon, it’s not funny—it’s a straw on the camel’s back.

This article was, in many ways, a cry for help. A darkly comic field report from the frontline.

It wasn’t polished.

It wasn’t empathetic.

It wasn’t at all scientific.

It was frustrated.

And that, in retrospect, was both its power and its problem.

The Concept of “Opportunity Cost” in Primary Care

The authors’ framing principle—“opportunity cost”—remains one of the most underappreciated truths in modern healthcare.

Every GP appointment taken up by a request that could’ve been handled by self-care, pharmacy, or common sense, is one less slot available for someone with undiagnosed cancer, a silent MI, or a child with sepsis. This invisible trade-off is all the more damaging now, as GPs wrestle with growing backlogs and competing demands.

The problem is, the healthcare system didn’t just create opportunity cost—it erased opportunity itself. Patients are often unaware that their 10-minute slot could’ve gone to someone else, because there’s no visible queue. And the same system that teaches patients to seek help early also punishes doctors for saying no.

Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

One of the ironies is that every GP I know would still rather see someone who turns out to be well than miss the one person who isn’t.

But what the Resilient GP piece got painfully close to saying—and perhaps failed to land—is that empathy isn’t infinite.

The drip-drip-drip of non-medical, administrative, or socially misplaced requests wears doctors down. It chips away at the ability to care. It seeds resentment. And worst of all, it pushes good people toward disillusionment and departure.

And when those doctors leave, it’s the genuinely unwell, frightened, and vulnerable who lose most.

What the Article Got Wrong: The Fractured Social Contract

Where the article failed—utterly, in places—was in tone. Listing examples like “Doctor, my farts smell very bad” or “Please remove this pubic hair from between my teeth” without any context or reflection came off as sneering. It invited readers to laugh at patients, rather than with exhausted colleagues.

There was no room for nuance—no suggestion that behind some of these trivialities were lonely people, vulnerable people, anxious people. People with attachment issues. People raised without functional models of self-care. People using the GP as priest, parent, or punching bag.

And when published in the open rather than in a private forum, the article made something implicit suddenly public: that GPs vent about patients. Which they do. Which they must. But which, when broadcast, undermines trust in an already fragile doctor-patient relationship.

Why It’s Still Relevant in 2025: The Tragedy of Misused Time

Nearly a decade later, the core issue hasn’t changed—it’s just gotten worse.

• Waiting lists are longer than ever.

• Burnout is endemic.

• Trust in general practice is at an all-time low.

• And the line between clinical need and social care gap has never been blurrier.

COVID intensified every pressure described in that 2015 article. Loneliness, misinformation, digital literacy gaps, dependency on doctors as navigators of everything from mould to childcare to housing. As recent research notes, GPs have become the system’s catch-all for unmet need, rather than just its clinical gatekeepers.

The public asks more from GPs now, not less. And the time to meet that demand has only shrunk.

The most tragic bit? Many of those patients—the trivial, the misdirected, the misunderstood—aren’t villains. They’re victims of a system that never gave them another port of call.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The article was taken down. But the feelings behind it haven’t gone away. So maybe the better question isn’t whether GPs should have published that list. It’s:

Why did so many feel the need to?

And how can we build a healthcare system—no, a society—where those needs, frustrations, and absurdities are dealt with upstream?

Where patients have other people to call, and doctors can do the job they trained for, and nobody thinks their GP is the right person to ask about a broken nail or a dream about their 12-year-old daughter dying?

Final Thought: Empathy and Boundaries Are Not Opposites

It’s possible to feel both exhausted and empathetic. It’s possible to love your job and still loathe parts of it. To care deeply for your patients and still roll your eyes when someone books a double appointment to discuss a sneeze and a splinter.

The Resilient GP article made people uncomfortable because it lifted the curtain on those contradictions. It didn’t do so delicately. But it touched a truth:

When doctors aren’t allowed to have boundaries, they break.

And when that happens, nobody wins—not the NHS, not the doctor, and certainly not the patient.

Maybe the conversation that piece started is the one we still need to have—only with more compassion, more honesty, and a little less carrier bag full of blue poo.

Stay Gross

—DW