Dr Christian Jessen lives an odd life. Quite regularly, people send him photos of their diseased body parts; others seek medical advice from him on Twitter, which he retweets with his response in capital letters before the question. So: “IT’LL KILL YOU IN AN HOUR OR TWO. @DoctorChristian how poisonous exactly?”
Dr Christian, as he prefers to be known, is the presenter of Channel 4’s prime-time hits Embarrassing Bodies and Supersize vs Superskinny. In the former, members of the public air their piles, warts and assorted deformities for the benefit of a grateful nation; in the latter, an overeater and an under-eater swap diets for a week in the “feeding clinic”.
Both shows have millions of viewers. As a result, Jessen is now our best-known telly doctor (and he is a real one, unlike Gillian McKeith and her internet PhD). But where a previous generation had Robert Winston talking through his trustworthy moustache about the miracle of life, Dr Christian is more likely to go to Magaluf, strip down to his pants and give everyone a pep talk about genital warts.
The big question is –why? Why would anyone submit to showing off their bunions, never mind their STI, on national TV? “Sometimes, they’ve been trying for ages to get help and they haven’t been able to get it,” he tells me over juice and pastries at a hotel in London. “Some of them are very political. Some of them are [saying]: ‘I want to promote my condition because I’ve had it long enough and my GP doesn’t seem to understand what it is.’”
Isn’t there an element of the freak show? “The word ‘exploitative’ drives me mad. These people have watched the show – it’s been going on for, what, seven series now?”
No one can accuse him of not practising what he preaches. He’s spoken about having a hair transplant and his struggle with body dysmorphia, which makes him see a puny weakling in the mirror, when he actually looks more like He-Man. Once, asked on Twitter if he’d ever had an STI, he simply replied: “YES”.
Hearing from so many people about their problems, he has a clear perspective on the health service. “The NHS is really, really good at dealing with acute problems, emergencies, major illnesses like cancers. Where it’s not so good is [treating] your ingrowing toenail, your small hernia, your haemorrhoids . . . But what other way is there of doing it, really?”
He certainly doesn’t think that the NHS should refuse treatment to immigrants, as some right-wing papers have suggested. “What I like about the NHS – and this is a contentious issue – is that if you’re a poor, African woman with HIV and you know you’re going to die in your country and your children are going to die, if you scrape the money together to get [here], they’ll look after you.” He pauses and flashes a wry, if expensively maintained, smile. “I don’t think we can afford to, but that’s a different issue.”
Unlike most doctors I have met, Dr Christian is unafraid of the internet and how it has changed patients’ expectations. He loves to tweet, despite the British Medical Association’s worries about the medium, and in one series of Embarrassing Bodies, people used Skype to consult him. He thinks that video calls could be a scalable solution for those who find it hard to visit their doctor in person (“Most GP questions are: ‘Should I worry? Shouldn’t I?’”).
He also doesn’t mind when patients turn up having researched their condition on the web. “I don’t sigh. Well, sometimes I do. Patients come in and they go, ‘Doctor, you gave me these tablets and I’ve just seen that according to the latest trial data they’re not necessarily the right ones.’ That can only be good for us.”
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