A piece in the BMJ argues that medical notes can describe a patient’s condition but can never capture what it actually feels like to be them.
A medical record holds facts — diagnoses, test results, medication lists. What it cannot hold, according to a piece published by the BMJ, is the lived experience of the person those notes describe.
Writing in the BMJ, Melanie Allsop makes the case that clinicians risk losing sight of who a patient actually is when their attention stays fixed on the chart. The argument isn’t that records don’t matter — they do — but that they’re a starting point, not a full picture.
It’s a distinction that sounds simple. In practice, it shapes everything from how a consultation feels to whether a patient leaves with a plan they’ll actually follow.
Allsop’s piece doesn’t offer a checklist. It asks clinicians to hold both things at once: the clinical detail in the notes and the human being sitting across from them, who may be frightened, exhausted, or simply not sure how to explain what’s wrong in medical language.
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Source: @bmj_latest
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