It explains why she and many doctors are not surprised by the scandals exposed to the public over the last few months. Nothing has changed.

Perhaps the only thing that has surprised the medical community is the intense interest the public has shown in a debate that ostensibly does not affect them. After all, the bullying exposed is not the egregious kind seen in the ADF. At a glance, at least, there is no obvious evidence that bullying in medicine is worse than many other professions.

What rightly shocks people however is seeing a profession that outwardly demonstrates compassion and altruism, but inwardly betrays itself. Of all the professions that might be expected to stay uncorrupted by bullying and harassment, medicine might reasonably have been expected to be one of them. Instead, medicine has exposed a confronting reality: not only is no institution immune to this corrosion, but that the corrosion is institutionalised.

Seeing good doctors simultaneously be bad colleagues and superiors is an odd cognitive dissonance that I too have struggled to reconcile. I have seen kind clinicians to whom, even now, I would gladly send my family as patients, who then abused staff as soon as patients were out of sight.

This surprises no one in medicine. This Jekyll and Hyde complex is not due to a mass sociopathy that pervades our profession. It's because of an invisible education. While we study and train in the curriculum of medical science, and being compassionate to patients, we also training in the hidden curriculum of medicine – the inculcation of the hierarchy.