Patients should avoid seeing their GPs in the afternoon - because overworked doctors are drained of empathy by lunchtime, research suggests.
A study in the UK found that more than half of family doctors think they are working above safe limits, with some dealing with more than 100 cases a day.
GPs said that the overload was putting patients at risk and fatigue was leading to poor decisions, errors and irritability.
The polling of 1681 GPs by Pulse magazine found that they dealt, on average, with 41 patients a day while reckoning that 30 was a safe number.
One Hertfordshire GP said: "There is a point where I feel cognitively drained; after about 20 patients, there is not an iota of empathy left."