'If you have children in Australia, they will be obese'

This week I was faced with the knowledge that I needed to get the prescriptions for my chronic medication renewed. Finding a doctor was a little daunting, especially given that my GP back in Joburg is a woman who has treated me since I was seven years old.

Where would I find a relationship like that again? Who would take me? I’d read stories of how GPs in many parts of Australia are refusing to take on new patients because they are already overloaded thanks to a national shortage.

As a first step, I phoned up a practice in Mosman, where I live; riding the bus up to Military Road, I’d noticed a sign announcing that new patients were welcome. Not that welcome, as it turned out: new patients are only welcome during the week. Since this would have meant taking time off work, this was not an option. I’d have to hunt in the Sydney CBD.

Turns out there are plenty of doctors in Sydney; there’s an entire website devoted to listing them. So many doctors, in fact, that deciding which one to go for was far too intimidating. In the end, I hummed and haed, finally opting for “bulk billing” as a search term. Bulk billing means that a medical practitioner will submit the bill directly to Medicare rather than requiring the patient to pay upfront. Simply put, a doctor prepared to bulk bill was likely to be less expensive, I reasoned, and with the relatively straightforward nature of my particular requirements, I wasn’t too keen to pay for flashy consulting rooms and the nice car.

Lo and behold, I managed to get an appointment with a doctor just one block up from the office. I couldn’t believe my luck. All the signs were reassuring: despite the good address, the cramped waiting room was filled with notes fixed to the walls with sticky tape. This practice could only keep going, one informed the reader, if most patients happily paid more than the Medicare rate.

Another reminded patients that the doctor here specialised in workplace injury, type 2 diabetes and overweight. I examined a map of the world on the wall, peering at the vast blue expanse of the Pacific. Never realised that Easter Island was so far east — east of French Polynesia in fact — and the property of Chile. And where on earth was Guam, home to the world’s worst infestation of brown tree snakes?

I was wrested from my geographic reverie by the announcement that the doctor was ready to see me. I turned around and there he was. A wizened, bearded little man in a tweed jacket and cardigan. Dressed in a cloak and given a wooden staff to hold, he would not have looked out of place in Lord of the Rings.

I was both a little disconcerted — I suspected he might be elderly, but the wrong side of 75? — and annoyed with myself for being so ageist. Presumably he wouldn’t be allowed to practise if he was completely doddery, but still, age somehow sits better with philosophers and elder statesmen than it does with medical professionals. I followed him into his consulting room. Why was he still working? I wondered. Could he not afford to retire? I noted the presence of antiseptic spray, a microscope and various boxes of the kind one would see in any GP’s rooms.

We discussed why I was there. Prescriptions, I explained. I was asthmatic; had been since I was five years old. He peered at me through thick glasses with his watery eyes and then launched into a monologue in which he made some observations on the side effects of corticosteroids and how many people wrongly diagnose bronchitis as asthma. He made little waving movements with his hands to symbolise the bronchi becoming clogged with mucus.

“I was treated by an asthma specialist for many years,” I said, fearing that he was about to refuse to prescribe the medication I use to keep me breathing. Instead, he told me how winds generally move from west to east; that the eastern parts of Australia are generally worse because of this, and that there are many grass seeds in the air at this time of year. They also have something called the wattle.

I know all about wattles, I told him. South Africa is full of wattles.

He moved on from wattles to technique. He would teach me how to clear my lungs. Children do not grow up learning how to clear their lungs and this is essential. He stood up to demonstrate: first he illustrated the technique by acting angry — “What happens when you get angry with someone? You get bigger” — then forcing air from his lungs through his nose. The air has to travel 90 degrees to go through the mouth, he pointed out, which is why the nose is better.

“You might have to do this in private,” he said, after demonstrating the nose-blowing technique with a striped handkerchief.

Then he sat down to write out my prescriptions. His handwriting matched him perfectly: shaky, spidery, a little angular. He tore the pages from his notebook and handed them to me. “Thank you”, I said, but he was not done. In fact, he was even chattier now. He knew Mosman, he said; he’d driven a cab around there in the 50s, while he was studying. But his real passion was the problem of fat people. Australians are getting fatter and fatter. Yet, I said, they have the second highest life expectancy in the world, after the Japanese.

He nodded, but he was a man of firm views and he was not going to be deterred from impressing them upon me. “If you live in Australia, you will be overweight,” he said. “If you have children, they will be obese.” This seemed a bit fatalistic, I thought, but I nodded dutifully, remembering the notices sticky-taped to the walls outside. “When I was in my sixties,” he continued, “I was not well. You should see only muscle and bone when you look at yourself. Nothing else. So I changed my diet.”

“None of the doctors will tell you this. They all lie to you because they want patients to keep coming back! The secret” – he paused, as if about to impart that bit of The Secret that Rhonda Byrne overlooked — “is to never eat a large meal at night.”

And with that, he showed me out.