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I was so glad to get to talk to GP Amy Fulton about Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.  This is an astonishingly good dystopian fiction novel, which I thoroughly thoroughly enjoyed. It's unusual to find a novel that really has you gripped, sucked into another world imagining something unimaginable and then brought back to earth again and again and again when you realise that this is fiction and of course this is not happening in Ireland where this book is set but that there is a lot more reality in what Paul Lynch is writing about than we want there to be.

Prophet Song is an incredibly, incredibly good book, which has really made me think so much. And it was a real joy to talk to Amy about it and think about some of the themes in there that can really make a difference to us as healthcare professionals.

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I'd like to dedicate today's episode of Bedside Reading to Corporal Hugh Cunningham of the Royal Engineers.  Hugh died in 2009 as a result of PTSD. And as I read Matthew Green's Aftershock: the Untold Story of Surviving Peace, I thought a lot about him and his family, as well as more widely about other military veterans affected by PTSD.

I've really enjoyed my conversation with Manchester Portfolio GP Zalan Alam  today. It is such an important book. I'm not going to lie and say I really enjoyed it. I didn't. I found it an incredibly difficult read. But it is a very, very important book about a subject which we really are not talking enough about.And I really do think this is a book that everybody and anybody who's working anywhere in the health service should be picking up

Aftershock is a book about PTSD, it's a book about military veterans, about what we are doing and sadly not doing to support them. I recognise that a lot has happened in the 10 years since the book was published so perhaps things are better than they were then. I'm not sure and I don't think we can be complacent and I don't think we can think enough about this incredibly vulnerable group of patients.

It's a deservedly emotional and tough read, but we do really need to be thinking about this a lot more and we really need to be doing better.

If you want your practice to become a RCGP Veteran Friendly Practice find out more here https://elearning.rcgp.org.uk/course/view.php?id=803

It may help to signpost patients to Veteran's Gateway
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/find-support-for-veterans-and-their-families

Zalan also recommends http://www.overcoming.co.uk

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I love coming back to books I've read in the past that I've half remembered and half forgotten and it's one of those episodes today. I'm delighted to welcome Sarah Marwick to Bedside Reading to talk about Never Split the Difference: negotiating as if your life depended on it by Chris Voss. This is such an accessible brilliant book written by a former FBI hostage negotiator. You may think, what on earth has hostage negotiation got to do with working in the and NHS?  Actually, there are huge numbers of transferable skills and strategies that we can use in our conversations with patients and with colleagues and with managers. And this is just such a great book, so readable, so accessible, and and full of practical tips and the lived experience wisdom.  It was really, really good to explore these with Sarah and think about how we might use them in our professional and social contexts.

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I'm really pleased to welcome GP, lifestyle medicine expert and GP educator Anish Kotecha to Bedside Reading today. We are talking about a book called Age Proof by Rose Ann Kenny. You may be relieved to discover that when we say the science of aging, we are not talking about the science fiction of anti-aging and we're certainly not talking about chemicals or drugs or modifications of anything other than lifestyle. It was really good to talk to Anish about connection, about intimacy, about the quality of relationships, about purpose, about exercise: things that actually are within our power as healthcare professionals to start exploring with our patients. We need to be thinking about the evidence base behind that and how we communicate it more effectively.

Follow Anish on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/anish-kotecha-547a4495

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Happy New Year listeners! Have you made any New Year's resolutions? Have you decided that 2025 is the year where things are going to be different? Have you been thinking about boundaries? Or about well-being? Or about that hideous word resilience which is so misused by NHS managers and has come to be a bit of a dirty word when actually the concept is a really good one.


Today, I'm delighted to be talking to Chrissie Mowbray and Karen Forshaw about their book, How to Rise: a Complete Resilience Manual. This is a really innovative book, which is all about providing us with easily accessible tools to make us better, to be thinking about resilience in a sense of emotional resilience, psychological resilience, physical resilience, relationship resilience, and to try and be better versions of our best selves. It's a really accessible, useful book and I thoroughly enjoyed talking to Chrissie and Karen.

Find Karen and Chrissie here: https://www.resilientpractice.co.uk/

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I've got a collaborative Twixtmas special coming up today. I've asked a number of friends of the podcast to tell us about their top read of 2024 and what they're most looking forward to reading in 2025. Thanks for joining me in 2024, and I'm looking forward to sharing plenty more books with you in 2025.

Featured today are the voices and choices of:
Sabina Dosani https://sabinadosani.com/
Leah Hazard https://www.leahhazard.co.uk/
Derek Ochiai https://twitter.com/DrDerekOchiai
Helen Blomfield https://www.helenblomfield.co.uk/
Pim Dhahan https://www.linkedin.com/in/pim-dhahan-1a21a5b9/
Nicola Ennis https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicola-ennis-3b5ab1215/
Claire McKie https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-mckie-a54a52234/
Nicola Davis https://bsky.app/profile/drnicoladavis.bsky.social and  https://bsky.app/profile/crxeate.bsky.social
Anna Baverstock https://bsky.app/profile/annabav.bsky.social
David Hindmarsh https://www.youtube.com/c/GPTemplates
Kate Wharton  https://www.instagram.com/katewharton27/?hl=en
Dani Hall https://x.com/danihalltweets and https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/

The books we recommended are:

Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan
Song of the Whole Wide World by Tamarin Norwood
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
In Memoriam by Alice Wynn
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li
The Trees by Percival Everett
Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris
Divided by Annabel Sowemimo
How to Save Babylon by Safiya Sinclair
Unheard by Rageshri Dhairyawan
Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdal
You be Mother by Meg Mason
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

The books we are looking forward to are:

Heartstopper 6 by Alice Oseman
Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Book of Dust Trilogy by Philip Pullman
The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith
Tell me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
The 5th book in Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club Series
The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel
Poems as Friends by Fiona Bennett
Kokoro by Beth Kempton
Microskills by Adaira Landry and Reesa E Lewiss 
Your Worry Makes Sense Martin Brunet
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

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I imagine there may be lots of listeners who are very familiar with Marion Keyes and the Walsh family so it was a great joy today to be talking to Rosie Shire about the latest in the Walsh family saga, My Favourite Mistake by Marion Keyes. There is some typical Marion Keyes in that you know that nothing really, really bad is ever going to happen, that the plot is going to keep you going as you go along and there's going to be nothing truly miserable.

There's quite a lot of depth in this story as we follow Anna, 47, recently split from a long-term relationship, as she moves to small town Ireland from New York. What could possibly go wrong? Well, for a start, a local GP is not going to give her HRT.

Rosie and I had a great conversation  about what it is to be middle aged, about relationships, about menopause, about access to HRT. I really hope you're going to enjoy listening to what we had to say.

We mentioned some menopause training resources:
https://thebms.org.uk/
https://www.fsrh.org/Public/Public/Education-and-Training/essentials-of-menopause-care.aspx
https://www.menopausematters.co.uk/
https://drjengunter.com/

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Today's book is one like nothing else I've ever read. It's a real treat to talk to liaison psychiatrist Amy Gledhill about In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Mercado. This is an extraordinary memoir. It is incredibly beautifully written and it is ostensibly about a controlling and abusive relationship with the complicating factor of being a queer relationship. There's much more to it than that. It is incredibly beautifully written, very very short chapters, so incredibly readable and
quick and though deep and one that you might well want to go back to again and again. 

There is so much learning and reflection in the book and I've really really enjoyed exploring it with Amy.

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It's a huge treat today to welcome Chella Quint OBE to Bedside Reading. Chella is a period activist and educator from Sheffield and she is the author of two absolutely wonderful books including Own Your Period: a fact-filled guide to period positivity which I think is quite possibly one of the best non-fiction books for young people that you could ever want to read. It is phenomenal for older people as well and for grown-ups, for doctors, for anybody, definitely definitely one to put on your Christmas list  to give to lots of people. It's a book that debunks so many period myths and answers so many potentially unanswered questions. 

I had a great conversation with Chella.  Please do follow her period positive  website https://periodpositive.com/

and and her social media:
https://www.instagram.com/period_positive/

https://twitter.com/PeriodPositive

https://www.facebook.com/periodpositive/

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A warm welcome today to former GP and now headache specialist, Dr Janice Heath, who joins me today to talk about The Outrun, Amy Liptrot's memoir of alcoholism, addiction, recovery and living in Orkney. It's a really beautiful book which has been made into a very recent film starring Saoirse Ronan and the storytelling and the imagery in the book are absolutely stunning. (Janice has watched the film. I haven't yet. I've seen the trailers though and actually the images seem just as Amy describes them and in her beautiful, beautiful writing.) There's a lot to think about here in terms of thinking about addiction and recovery:  addiction and the path through from chaos into something manageable. I really enjoyed talking to Janice much in the same way that I really enjoyed the book.