Poisonous witches and nonsense journalism

I was directed by a post on Doctors.net to a blog on the News of The World posted on the 1st of June. Now, I know that the rag in question is not famed for it's quality investigative journalism, but the sheer screaming vitriol of this article, it's absence of factual accuracy, made me want to throttle the writer. Her name is Carole Malone and she basically blames doctors for all that's wrong with world.

Very sadly, her father died of colon cancer. She feels this is the fault of his GP for referring him too late. However, rather than complaining to the GP or through appropriate channels, she has written a spiteful rant about how all GPs do is cadge money from the government for doing less and less work, in fact, it's their fault the NHS is short of cash and they get paid a quarter of a million pounds each.

If only! I don't understand why people are allowed to write journalistic articles containing such wild inaccuracies. Firstly, GPs don't really earn anything like that much. The income to their practice (as a partner) has to pay for the whole practice for heavens sake. And just because they had horrendous hours in the the past, for which they were not renumerated, doesn't mean they should be treated even worse now. And whatever the GPs salary, she's not publishing her own in the national press, is she?

I just don't know why people have it in for doctors at the moment, I really don't. 2 days before my finals is not a good time to be thinking this is really not a promising profession.