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I am so delighted to be talking to Emily Katy, the author of Girl Unmasked: How Uncovering My Autism Saved My Life. I love talking to authors. I'm always fascinated to be talking to authors who are also health professionals. Emily is both: a psychiatric nurse and a writer. I've been following Emily on social media for quite a while, I was really excited when her book came out to see what it was going to be like because I'd read her blog and I'd seen a lot of other articles that she'd written. It was a real joy today to meet her properly and to be talking about her book, why she wrote her book, about her life experiences and thinking a lot about autistic women and autistic girls, why they get missed, why it is important that we think about autism and why the stereotypes that many of us have been brought up on are quite simply wrong and mean that people go without a diagnosis and unnoticed.

Follow Emily on Twitter https://twitter.com/ItsEmilyKaty
and on instagram https://www.instagram.com/itsemilykaty
Her brilliant blog is here: https://www.authenticallyemily.uk/

Emily is a trustee of the brilliant charity Autistic Girls Network find them here: https://autisticgirlsnetwork.org/

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I've got two brilliant guests with me to today, Roo Shah and Jens Foell, who have written a phenomenal book called Fighting for the Soul of General Practice: the Algorithm will see you now. This is a wonderful book, two GPs, one based in London, one based in rural North Wales writing about  patient stories and the values of relational medicine, thinking about what we are at risk of losing as we try wholly appropriately to manage demand, to keep services running when there isn't enough money and there aren't enough staff.


But what we're losing by doing it, and whether in fact it's okay to stand up and say, "I don't want to be replaced by a computer". I've long said that the things that are of the most value are those which are not directly measurable and so I absolutely loved Jens and Roo's book.  It's very, very readable and it'll make you think, but it won't hurt your head. It's not difficult. It's not dense text. They are both phenomenal storytellers, and this is really about stories and the value of what lies beneath the iceberg, the tip of the iceberg perhaps being a diagnosis but recognising there is so so much more going on and really what we risk losing if we don't remember that.

I love the book and I have really really enjoyed talking to Jens and Roo and I would really strongly encourage you to go and buy yourself a copy of this book as soon as you possibly can.

Roo mentions the brilliant short story The Machine Stops  by E M Forster you can read it online here: http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/59/59.pdf

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A warm welcome back today to James Thambirajah, who is here to talk to me about a book called Heart, a History by Sandip Jauhar. This is, I will confess, a book that I probably might not have picked up voluntarily but James is very persuasive, and I'm really glad I did pick it up, because once I had  I was absolutely compelled to keep reading.  Sandip Jawa is a wonderful writer. He's a cardiologist based in the USA. And this interweaves stories, stories of people, stories of Sandeep's own life, story of patients, stories of his family, with the history of cardiology. The history of cardiology. I didn't really know a huge amount about the history of cardiology it is just fascinating to realise how far we've come over the last 50 or 100 years. I'm really thinking about the bravery of the people who chose to give up everything to explore what they thought might be going on. We've got stories of young doctors passing wires into their own arms and legs in the earliest angiograms. We've got prototype bypass machines being built. We've got people making cardiac pacemakers in their kitchens. It's absolutely incredible, really, really exciting. And I would say I'm not even particularly interested in cardiology, but this is holistic cardiology. This is the history of medicine with some cardiology and some humanity and thinking about hearts in the sense of the heart and soul of a person. It's a cracking read and I've loved talking to James about it.

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It's a warm welcome back to a guest today. I'm delighted to be talking to Susan Matthew about Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent. Susan came on the podcast a couple of years ago and I got an email from her out of the blue recently saying, "I've just read this book, it's absolutely brilliant, I think you'd really like it and I really need to talk about it on the podcast" and I was really quite intrigued. I picked it up and it said on the cover that it was a crime novel and my heart slightly sank because I'm not a huge crime fan. But actually, I'm not convinced that this book is a crime novel. It's just a brilliant, brilliant novel with some twists and turns along the way. Maybe that's how you define what crime is.... 

There are loads of themes in here. It's a great book. Lots and lots of things to think about: adverse childhood experiences, the power of community, the importance of transitional objects, how we learn, whether labels matter. There is so much to talk about and so much to think about, and I really enjoyed talking to Susan.

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Regular listeners will know that I love talking to writers and I love poetry. So what a joy it is today to welcome Anna Davidson to Bedside Reading to talk about her debut poetry collection: Poetry for Life and Other Chronic Conditions. Anna's poems are absolutely beautiful. It's a very beautiful little book, it's got a gorgeous cover and the contents, both the poems and the writing around the poems and the sense of why Anna wrote these poems, what they mean for her and what she hopes they might achieve for the world is just fabulous. and If you're thinking of a collection to recommend, I can't really think of anything else that is quite like it.  In terms of thinking about invisible illness, thinking about disability, thinking about recovery, thinking about missing out, some of the psychological effects of living with a physical long-term condition, um It's absolutely unbeatable, certainly something I'm going to be using in my teaching and it's a collection I think I will come back to again and again.

Anna recommended https://www.theyogaforlifeproject.co.uk/

Link to buy the book from all retailers:

https://books2read.com/poetryforlife

Poetry on Instagram: 

https://www.instagram.com/mondayispoetry/

Author website:

https://therightword.co.uk/

Amazon link to buy the book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Poetry-Life-Other-Chronic-Conditions-ebook/dp/B0D5VWQDRK/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9._vNdz86YT_1x-XcrFRc6ZyigquxkN6XBRpe5__1MlJpj4bmAGtIn0TyJ1PW2nmtuEkubRrff3Z_LLlYIQZV9mtzVNl7OIGC2DLXCPq6LDT2M1AMixviEn5P7a7lTT-7H.8lMSqBB0IJZ5Zl5htpdSWpWVCi0egqDE-_VmL9s5BtU&qid=1722246103&sr=8-1

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A warm welcome back to GP, educator and YouTube sensation, Dave Hindmarsh. Today we are going to be talking about Turn the Ship Around, which is a really interesting book about leadership. Don't switch off if you're not interested in leadership, there is so much here that is transferable. And the thing I really enjoyed about To Turn the Ship Around is that it is not a book that is telling you what to do. It is somebody reflecting on their own experiences, somebody thinking about failure, about intelligent failures, thinking about how you can reflect on situations that you have predicted will go one way and that end up going another way.


Dave and I explore how you can learn from that and how you can turn quite a dysfunctional disparate organisation into something that really works, an organisation which people are proud to be part of. And I found that really, really compelling from the perspective of being a leader, from the perspective of being a teacher. And also I think from the perspective of being within an organisation, what it is to have a leader-leader model rather than a leader-follower model. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I've really enjoyed exploring it with Dave.

Dave an I mentioned some other brilliant resources

1. The Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters
2. The You are Not a Frog podcast https://youarenotafrog.com/
3. The Conversational Framework as described by Diana Laurillard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSP2YlgTldc

Find Dave's brilliant YouTube channel here:  https://www.youtube.com/c/GPTemplates

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A warm welcome today to podcast legend and all round inspiration Dr Rachel Morris. Rachel is best known for hosting her own phenomenal podcast You Are Not A Frog https://youarenotafrog.com/ which helps people work smarter, beat burnout, think more and overthink less.  Rachel is also a speaker, coach and former GP.

Find Rachel's coaching business Wild Monday here: https://www.wildmonday.co.uk/

We are talking about Elizabeth is Missing  the wonderful novel by Emma Healey which was also adapted for TV starring Glenda Jackson. Told from the perspective of Maud, an elderly lady who we realise quickly is the ultimate "unreliable narrator" in that she has dementia. Friendship, dementia, dignity, carer stress, pragmatic soliutions all feature as well as this being a brilliant sort of a "whodunnit" (no spoilers in the episode we promise!

Rachel recommended Graham Allcott's The Productivity Ninja https://www.grahamallcott.com/books/productivity-ninja

and we also mentioned  Being Mortal  by Atul Gawande https://atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/

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I've got a cracking episode coming up for you today. I'm delighted to be joined by Joe Thomas, a hospitalist, from Buffalo in New York to talk about the Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. I loved Abraham Verghese first novel Cutting for Stone more than I can begin to tell you and it's a book that's got a special place in my heart because it was the first book that we read as part of the medical humanities book club and which I set up twelve years ago and which is still running. I knew that Abraham Verghese had a new book out and I sensed it was going to be an absolute cracker but I hadn't got around to reading it and then I had an email from Joe asking had I read it yet and please could he come on and talk about it because he was thinking about it so much. This is a book set in India in the early twentieth century, taking us up through until the later twentieth Century.  There's quite a lot of medicine in the book. Really credible medicine because Abraham Verghese is a wonderful novelist and he's also a doctor. So you don't need to get irritated by the medicine being wrong. There are themes around family, around education,  about history, secrets,  support,  communities, intersectionality, medical negligence the end of an empire. Oh my goodness there is so much in this book and if you pick it up and you think "gosh it's very long", it flies by because it is absolutely absorbing. I loved it so much and I cannot tell you how much I've enjoyed talking to Joe today about it.

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Today's episode is all about a very short and very powerful novel by Max Porter, Shy. In 122 pages Max Porter inhabits the mind of a very troubled teenage boy called Shy.  Nicola Ennis, my guest, and I both  have quite significant life experiences of working with children and young people think that this is probably the best insight into the mind of a troubled teenage boy that you could possibly wish to have. It is quite dark. It's also funny. It's just an incredible insight and I think there is so much to talk about in terms of how we respond to young people how we respond to young people in distress and what it takes to remain. The grown-up in a situation where a distressed young person is behaving in a way that you wish they weren't and to be honest, they wish they weren't too I really hope you're going to enjoy our conversation today.

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A warm welcome back to a previous guest today. It's a real joy to be talking to  Professor Ellie Hothersall-Davis from the University of Dundee. We have come up with today six books which we think would be really, really good as reading material before starting a medical degree.

Maybe people listening who have got children or godchildren or nieces or nephews or next door neighbours who are planning to become doctors. Arguably actually perhaps becoming any sort of healthcare professional because I think the themes for all of these books are translatable across healthcare and Ellie and I wanted to think about what we could suggest to people to be reading that aren't textbooks that will give them enjoyment and escapism and help them to promote empathy, to think about things from another perspective, to lose themselves in a book whilst also being able to think more deeply about something they might never previously have considered. We've got six cracking books coming up today and I really hope that you are going to enjoy thinking about them.

The books we discussed:

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
The Cure for Good Intentions by Sophie Harrison
The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini

We also briefly mentioned the Beekeeper of Alleppo