doctor, novelist and pioneer in honest medicine education

At first, he refused to name the disease that would eventually kill him for 20 years and that killed him on Friday. Because as soon as such a word is spoken, Wolffers thought, you are no longer a human being, but ‘a patient with a stamp on his forehead’. Then suddenly all conversations are about that disease, while he would much rather talk about good books, beautiful films.

Ivan Wolffers (Amersfoort, 1948) entered the public arena in the 1970s. As a young doctor he wrote columns in front of de Volkskrant. Ear infections, diaper rash, diabetes, all kinds of medical misery, large and small, were reviewed. At a time when doctors had the status of demigods in white coats, the columns helped readers to better understand their own bodies and, if desired, to ask critical questions about the prescribed medicines.

‘Google and websites like Pharmacy.nl and Thuisarts.nl didn’t exist then’, says Agnes Kant, epidemiologist and director of the side effects center Lareb. ‘Wolffers met an enormous need for information by explaining medical topics on the basis of his great social and social involvement.’

relationship of trust

Colleague doctors did not always appreciate that at the time and sent him angry letters, Wolffers wrote on his own website. “They accused me of undermining the trust between doctor and patient by giving out all this classified information about drugs. They probably meant that it became apparent that they did not know everything and that some of their patients therefore had less confidence in them. That seemed very good to me.’

Wolffers wrote a staggering amount of books, often on health issues, as well as novels that booksellers regularly accidentally placed among medical textbooks because of his reputation as a Notorious Doctor. There was also his standard work Medicinesof which half a million copies were sold.

Also radio and television editors frequently managed to find Wolffers. ‘He came into the living rooms almost every week, for years he was the most famous doctor in the Netherlands,’ says Toine Pieters, professor of pharmacy history. ‘He was regarded as an enormous authority: if Wolffers said something, it was so. He was also one of the first doctors to publicly file dubious claims from the pharmaceutical industry.”

VUmc

In the 1980s, Wolffers became professor of health care and culture at the VUmc, where Pieters also worked at the time. ‘The VUmc used him as a figurehead: look how we also embrace critical minds. A role that Wolffers played with verve. Besides being well versed in content, he was a real showman, who liked to push the boundaries of the debate.’

During lectures, for example, he showed a video of a man of Turkish descent who complains about his diabetes. How do you rate this man, he asked the audience. When students judged that his migration background probably played a role, because he could not find his way in healthcare, Wolffers showed a film of a Dutch person with a white skin with exactly the same story.

Wolffers received complaints about those lectures, he said in an interview in de Volkskrant in 2014. ‘Some students thought the videos were too accusatory, as if I was calling them all racist.’ While he wanted to make the doctors-to-be aware of one of the many pitfalls in contact with patients.

From 2002 Wolffers started publishing about his own experiences as a patient. First without mentioning the name of the disease; he thought that was a nice choice from a literary point of view, leaving something for the reader to guess. But when his son pointed out to him that interested parties and fellow sufferers could find his pieces very difficult through search engines, he gave the ‘ugly creature a name’.

prostate cancer. While he always wanted to tell the honest and complete story about medicine in his professional work, he also decided to describe his own disease course and treatment in detail. In 2014, for example, he wrote on his website about the nasty side effects of his cancer treatment: ‘I don’t consider myself an expert in the field of the balance between lust and love, but I do know that when lust takes flight and his brother-in-arms Testosterone, a great part of you is gone. You can still love, but the twin sister, the passion, is no longer there.’

Communication errors

He also regularly considers what goes right and wrong with communication in the hospital. For example, the time he stood at the treatment table without underwear and a nurse came in to introduce him to other practitioners. Or the time a doctor told me he had made a mistake by having Wolffers take two certain drugs together, because that combination makes you drowsy. ‘In other words, I had lived like half a zombie for a year for nothing. I really don’t need an SLR camera or kitchen crockery to compensate, but I would have liked to see an ounce of awareness in that man of what his mistake meant.’

Wolffers lived long after that cancer diagnosis in 2002, which taught him something in addition to pain and loss, according to another interview in de Volkskrant, about the meaning of life. ‘When you get sick, you learn to see better what the essence of life is. (…) For example, I discovered the beauty of nature myself. I had hardly let it sink in, even though I ran daily through the woods. What you especially don’t want to see when you’re healthy is death. We see them as something for others. That is not a reproach, because you should not walk around with that every day. Assume eternal life as long as you can.’