For those considering consulting and dealing with Dr Andrew Brooks.
Dealing with him always reminds one of something out of the Benny Hill comedy show.
When a patient approaches him for help because he has to urinate every time he has 200 mls of urine to produce, he tells him it’s because his bladder now only has a capacity of 200 mils – when he has, sitting on his desk in front of him, an independent report stating that it has a capacity of 330 mls.
And when the patient asks him for a copy of another independent report indicating that after the patient had urinated his bladder was still more than half full, he refuses to provide it, knowing how much it would make him look like a liar – but all the time the patient was laughing at him because he already had a copy and just wanted to see what further shenanigans Brooks would get up to.
But never mind, according to Brooks, a TURP operation would fix everything – but oops! when it didn’t, it in fact left the patient worse off, he just dismissed it saying, “Well I’ll be buggered! That’s bad luck isn’t it!”
And when the patient found that an inevitable side effect of the TURP was that his sex life was largely ruined for the rest of his life, Brooks claimed that he’d done what any responsible surgeon would have done in these circumstances, got it in writing from his patient that he understood this would happen – but, “I’ll be buggered again!” he’d mislaid the piece of paper on which he had it in writing!
And when the patient had requested copies of the health records and information to which he was entitled to by law four or five times and had heard nothing, after 6 months, Brooks’ excuse was that he hadn’t got the requests because his ordinary email address on his website was set up so that it detected emails from patients and screened them out. (When this excuse was put to our technical advisers they couldn’t stop laughing! – quite apart from the fact that he’d already responded to one of my emails.)
And when all of this was presented to the Board Members of grandly named Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand, and you in particular, what was their response? – “A/Prof Brooks is highly respected by his peers.” A great response, eh! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!