As a broadcaster, Michael O’Donnell, who has died aged 90, was a popular presenter and panellist. On Radio 4 he reined in the verbal antics of Frank Muir and Denis Norden as chair of My Word! (1983-92), participated in Robert Robinson’s discussion programme Stop the Week (1976-92) and explored changing social attitudes by interviewing families of all sorts in Relative Values (1987-97).

On television he was a passionate and knowledgable presenter of health documentaries, as I found when producing Cross Your Heart and Hope to Live (1975). This was followed in the 1980s by four O’Donnell Investigates... programmes on food, drink, the food business and ageing, and in the 90s by several on belief and superstition.

Endlessly curious about exploring what, in a variety of ways, makes people tick, he quietly gave them the confidence for their stories to be told. In this he was aided by having been a GP for a decade from 1954, seeing the NHS at the coalface, albeit largely in the gentle hills of Weybridge, Surrey. He then became an iconoclastic and often irreverent editor of World Medicine (1966-82), a journal sometimes called the “doctors’ comic”.

Michael would have seen this as a term of praise, since at Cambridge he was in Footlights, and went on to write for the BBC Variety department (1949-52). He loved writing, and conveyed that love to those who wrote regularly for World Medicine, as I did from 1972. By allowing writers to write what they wanted, he was a writer’s editor and that’s what made World Medicine one of the widest read of the free medical publications.

But he also publicised important medical stories when others neglected them. Sometimes even the important stories had a quirkiness about them, like the revelation in the early days of CAT scan technology that a small proportion of people had only 5% of normal brain tissue and yet managed to lead a normal life. A disproportionate number of these were accountants. He brought a sophisticated sense of design to the magazine, with striking covers, good photography and innovative layouts, and left it only when compelled to take a characteristic stand on a freedom of speech issue.

Born in Yorkshire, Michael was the son of James O’Donnell, also a GP, and his wife, Nora (nee O’Sullivan). From Stonyhurst college, Lancashire, he won a scholarship to study natural sciences at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and then supported himself with his BBC earnings while training at St Thomas’ hospital in London.

Although he spent much of his working life in southern England, Yorkshire – specifically the mining village of Wath upon Dearne – was in his blood, and he never lost sight of the wider audience. He invented a northern town called Slagthorpe, and in Dr Donovan’s Bequest: Tales from the Slagthorpe Archive (2006) described the behaviour of fictional local doctors and their patients with humanity and humour.

Nine other books also explored medicine and medical practice with insight and sharp satire. Michael was passionately committed to the NHS and the doctors working in it, having observed his father dealing with the problems of general practice before the welfare state.

Having drawn attention in World Medicine to the unrepresentative General Medical Council, the doctors’ regulatory body, he stimulated a reform campaign which led to him becoming a thorn in the GMC’s side when he was elected to the council in 1971.

In subsequent elections he was consistently top of the poll, and did his best as “Rebel in Residence”, as he described himself, to make the council more democratic and less straitlaced. However, he became disenchanted with the GMC’s pace of change after the recommendations of the Merrison Committee in the mid-70s failed to achieve what Michael and the other rebels expected. He remained a member until 1996.

He occasionally accepted awards when they were from people whose professional judgement he respected. One of these was a Lifetime Achievement award from the Medical Journalists’ Association.

He declined the offer of an OBE in 1997, having expressed his attitude to honours in his book A Sceptic’s Medical Dictionary (1977), in which he defines something called “Knight Starvation” as an “affective disorder that afflicts senior doctors in their early to mid-50s. A progressive condition that deteriorates with the publication of each honours list and, in longstanding cases, can produce serious erosion of judgment and integrity.”

His Christmas parties were notable events, with regular attendance by the actors Glyn Houston and Francis Matthews, and songs around the piano, played by his wife, Catherine (nee Dorrington Ward), whom he had met at St Thomas’, where they had performed cabaret together. They married in 1953.

Catherine’s death in 2007 was followed two years later by that of their daughter Lucy, from lupus. Michael was fond of pointing out that she was the inspiration for a Beatles song, as a result of John Lennon’s son Julian, a nursery-mate of Lucy’s, bringing home a drawing he had made of her which he called “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.

Michael is survived by their two other children, Frances and Jamie.

• Michael O’Donnell, physician, author and broadcaster, born 20 October 1928; died 6 April 2019

• This article was amended on 29 April 2019. Michael O’Donnell died on 6 April, rather than 18 March 2019 as originally stated.