Further Confessions of a GP

Tummy aches

Tracey was in, yet again. I was also still receiving letters stating that she and her family were attending the emergency department too frequently, but I’d long since given up on trying to persuade Tracey not to visit so often. The latest hospital attendance was for ‘tummy aches’ in six-year-old Bradley and it was for that same reason that Tracey had brought him in to see me today.

‘They said up in A&E that they didn’t know what was wrong with him and to visit you instead,’ Tracey said.

Bradley was sitting sullenly in the chair rather than tearing around the room, which was out of character.

Once upon a time I had wanted to be a paediatrician and had spent a fair bit of time working on the children’s ward as a junior doctor. I could usually fathom out the cause of tummy pain in kids and I was confident that Bradley’s case would be no exception. I asked Bradley and his mum all about his symptoms. I asked about diarrhoea or constipation and if it hurt when he went for a wee. I asked if he was vomiting or had a fever and I made sure his glands weren’t up. I spent some time prodding his tummy, but it didn’t feel out of the ordinary, and when I tested his urine it was completely normal.

The next step was to ask about school. ‘Are any of the other children nasty to you at school?’ I asked. ‘Are you being bullied?’ Bradley shook his head.

‘He’s got loads of mates at school, Dr Daniels,’ Tracey butted in. ‘He loves school, but the teacher says he’s sitting out of games more and gets tired more easily.’ Bradley nodded gloomily in agreement at this. I got Bradley to get on the scales and when I plotted his weight on his growth chart it was dropping off a bit. Weight loss in children is a real worry and I urgently organised some more tests.

Within a couple of weeks Bradley had been for blood tests, X-rays and an ultrasound scan. Everything came back completely normal. I was relieved that Bradley didn’t have leukaemia, which had been my initial fear, but he was still having tummy aches and wasn’t himself. Most six-year-olds will complain of tummy aches at some point or another, but usually it doesn’t last once they are distracted by something fun. I asked Tracey to bring in Bradley to get weighed regularly by our nurse and it was this that led to a breakthrough.

‘He’s hungry,’ our practice nurse said to me triumphantly one morning after Bradley had been in.

‘Who’s hungry?’

‘Bradley, that boy you’ve been worried about. He’s having tummy aches because he’s hungry. That’s also why he’s stopped growing and losing weight and why he’s had no energy. It was obvious really. I asked Tracey about what he’s been eating and it turns out she’s been having problems with a debt collector and hasn’t been able to afford to buy food. She’s got herself in a right mess with it all and hasn’t told anyone.’

I had asked Bradley and his mum about every possible symptom and ordered a multitude of medical tests. But I hadn’t even considered asking if there was food in the house. Bradley wasn’t such a medical mystery after all. He was suffering from something unfortunately felt by millions of six-year-olds across the world. There was a famine in Tanzania when I was working out there and I saw hundreds of malnourished, hungry children. It just wasn’t something I was expecting to see in modern Britain. Our brilliant practice nurse Brenda had already put lots of things in place to help. The Citizens Advice team were working on resolving the debt issues and a charity was going to help with food donations until the family’s social worker helped sort out Tracey’s finances.

Bradley was an example of how easy it can be to give a medical diagnosis for what is actually a social problem. I wonder how many times I have labelled the misery of long-term poverty as clinical depression, and I once nearly diagnosed an old farm worker with eyesight problems, when the real reason he couldn’t read my chart was that he had never been taught to read. I see poverty on a daily basis, but never thought that I would see malnutrition in a six-year-old boy in Britain. We live in one of the richest countries in the world and food here is plentiful. I would like to think that Bradley was a one-off case, but as everyone is becoming increasingly squeezed financially, I fear that he may well not be.