Last week I popped into the optician’s to make an appointment for a routine eye test and I was asked if I was a patient there. Well, was I? A patient? Not before I stepped over the threshold, I thought, and I wasn’t ill. There were goods on sale, it looked like a shop and I wasn’t entirely convinced that I could be a patient in a shop. Maybe that sounds a little touchy – what’s wrong with being a patient if you’re receiving health care? Well the word, for a start. It implies passivity and dependence and not an … Continue reading Being Human: getting round the ‘them and us’ of clinical practice