Michael Mosley was my friend - he was always a risk-taker

What are the chances that two, if not three TV doctors, would have already befriended each other, before qualifying in medicine?

I first met Michael Mosley when we were at medical school in London. He had just begun dating Claire Bailey, who would go on to become his wife, and occasional co-broadcaster. She was studying a psychology degree whilst in the midst of her medical training, like myself. As his wife and I shared the same university tutorials, so I got to know Claire and Michael.

We have entertained each other at our respective homes, and they were delightful company, always modest despite their huge celebrity status. They shared a wicked sense of humour, and a healthy scepticism for medical pomposity, teasing me about the advice I dispensed on mine own broadcasts and popular writing.

We shared a concern that modern medicine did not focus enough on prevention.

Of course, TV doctors are not at all competitive with each other (!) but even I have to admit, they always looked incredibly fit, unlike many medics I know.

But did this tendency for physicians not to take care of themselves, have anything to do with this unexpected catastrophe?

We still don’t know the full details of this tragedy, but it’s striking that in the CVTV footage that has been so widely shared, during the desperate search for Dr Mosley, how he appears a lone figure, striding around an environment seeming much too brutally hot, for anyone else to venture out in.

I suspect his wife like any spouse, far less for being a doctor herself, would have advised him to be careful, or even to not leave the group at the beach.

But he clearly had a risk-taking element to his persona, given his many televised exploits, including swallowing tape-worms, sticking blood-sucking leeches on his arm, even enduring a ‘vampire facelift’.

I have been told that I see more stressed medics than any other psychiatrist in Harley Street.

Perhaps doctors don’t look after themselves as well, ironically, as they do their patients. Astonishingly few physicians go to see their own GPs for help or advice. They rely on themselves overmuch with their own healthcare.

As patients look up to them as absolute authority figures, medics themselves may come to believe they can never afford to appear vulnerable. Being super-human may seem part of the job description.

This tendency to neglect their own physical, and mental health, has serious repercussions; doctors endure a significantly higher suicide rate than the general population.

This sense of personal sacrifice for others, and maybe even that sense of invulnerability which doctors sometimes suffer from, perhaps explains why Dr Michael Mosley may have been so willing to test his own body to extremes in various TV programmes, in order to bravely assist the public better understand complex medical issues.

We don’t know if any of the theories above are part of the psychology of what happened, but being an expert doctor doesn’t mean that you don’t need looking after yourself.