What have I learnt from 40 years in the medical trade? First, medicine is more than the sum of its parts. Specialists specialise and their purity of thought and protected environment often shields them from the rough and tumble of generalised medicine. Specialists provide authoritative advice that is almost invariably correct but often uncontaminated by elements derived from other specialties. Second, a lot of useful general advice never makes it into textbooks and guidelines. Third, collections of such general advice tend to be, indeed have to be, rather unspecialised, unstructured and a bit random. This sums up the author and what I write below. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details