Andrew Papanikitas is Deputy Editor of the BJGP.
A song can haunt you. Sometimes it’s the music. Sometimes it’s the lyrics. Occasionally its something more conceptual, an idea! Olaf the snowman from theDisney musical, Frozen, sings a very jolly and upbeat song about how it would be wonderful to be a snowman in summer. Of course, he sings this never having experienced an actual summer or having considered its predictable effects. It’s all flowers, birds singing, and cold drinks on the beach! As a character (I am giving away nothing by saying he is a child’s snowman brought to life by magic), Olaf provides the lion’s share of light relief in the story, combining clumsy benevolence with often hilarious naïveté. Snowmen wishing for summer is uncomfortably similar to turkeys voting for Christmas and other political metaphors about ill-educated or unwise people voting against their own (and indeed against everyone’s) interests. I also sometimes feel that as fledgling professionals we have all been a bit ‘Olaf’ in only seeing the goods of our prospective careers rather than the complex and challenging reality. We can be less ‘Olaf’ as a profession through awareness of our past, our present, and our potential future. As ever, the articles in Life and Times tell a story, a meta-narrative that shares present realities, draws on the past, and attempts to speculate on the future.
Stories from the magical kingdom
In reviewing A Story is a Deal, Jens Tholstrup reminds us that stories have the power to influence people. The most powerful stories are the ones our audience identify with. We have a moral duty to authenticity, however recent history is riddled with excellent storytellers who abused their powers for personal gain while harming their audience — the book cites the Theranos scandal and Brexit.1 The story of medicine and general practice has its heroic figures. Peter McCartney gives us an introduction to the three professional aspects of Edward Jenner: GP, scientist, and writer.2 I like to tease medical students by suggesting that Jenner (hero of vaccination) would nowadays be doing prison time for crimes against humanity — the story goes that he proved vaccination worked by paying his gardener to give his 8-year-old boy a horrible illness, and then gave the boy a second horrible and more reliably lethal illness to see if surviving the first illness protected him against the second! In his time, however, Jenner was an educated man in the Aristotelian sense — he knew his stuff and knew how to write about it, the story he started ultimately persuaded society to adopt vaccination.
“Times are changing. Can we make our coming times something to sing about rather than fear?”
Personal stories are also shared in this issue. Caroline McCarthy tells and shows us what clinical course looks like — responding to patient unmet need and growing beyond your current professional ‘comfort zone’.3 Both accounts remind us that current GP residents in the UK and Ireland are sometimes having to overcome a ‘system’ that discourages professional flourishing by making stringent demands of learners without much meaningful assistance to meet those demands. As if in answer, John Launer reviews Becoming and Being a Physician: a Developmental Journey. He writes, ‘serious education for doctors concerns a universe of medicine beyond facts: this includes uncertainty, complexity, communication, emotion, ethics, organisational systems, how to teach and to learn, how to avoid burnout or breakdown, and, most of all, how to remain a doctor and a human being at the same time.’4
A dose of present realities
Alex Burrell’s selection of useful readings we might otherwise miss includes menstrual cups and IUD displacement, deprived-area GP retention, endometriosis diagnosis, and patient assertiveness.5 Nada Khan unpacks the erosion of GP pay in the UK. This stagnation and decline in GP pay is exacerbating already significant pressures of rising workloads and declining morale across the profession.6 Tim Senior challenges the public narrative that doctors are paternalistic, and asks whether a GP’s advocacy role is in any way parental — should it be more maternal?7
It’s the future, and AI is coming for your job!
Ben Hoban tells a creepy tale of a future interaction between a patient and an automated healthcare system that has adopted a paternalist modus operandi. It is framed as a transcript for the attention of a CEO.8 Telling a story through the writing or storytelling of characters is a technique adopted to great effect by both Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker.9 In contrast, Mohammad S Razai is not yet convinced that artificial intelligence (AI) scribes are the answer to the GP workload. AI scribes may become better over time; however, much of what is said in consultations is context-dependent, emotionally inflected, and shaped by subtle interpersonal cues.10
David Mummery looks at a potential way of spotting articles written by AI — that they use a long hyphen correctly in sentences. More broadly if an article is correctly punctuated but otherwise badly written — an AI (currently) may have authored it … good to know!11
We could think of Olaf as an emergent AI, but I am going to persist in using him as a metaphor for those of us who still have a romantic and dare I say idealistic view of the once and future GP. We are left with the question of how Olaf the snowman will survive the unfreezing of the kingdom in the musical. What will happen when the snowman gets to experience summer? Times are changing. Can we make our coming times something to sing about rather than fear?
References
1. Tholstrup J. Books: A Story is a Deal. Br J Gen Pract 2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp25X743037.
2. McCartney P. Three sides to Edward Jenner: GP, scientist, and writer. Br J Gen Pract 2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp25X742905.
3. McCarthy C. Clinical courage. Br J Gen Pract 2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp25X742929.
4. Launer J. Books: Becoming and Being a Physician: a Developmental Journey. Br J Gen Pract 2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp25X743061.
5. Burrell A. Yonder: Menstrual cups and IUD displacement, deprived area GP retention, endometriosis diagnosis, and patient assertiveness. Br J Gen Pract 2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp25X743025.
6. Khan N. Devalued: the financial erosion of the GP role. Br J Gen Pract 2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp25X743073.
7. Senior T. On not being paternalistic. Br J Gen Pract 2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp25X743049.
8. Hoban B. Delete after reading. Br J Gen Pract 2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp25X742989.
9. Papanikitas A. FRIGHTFriday: Art and science of hope and fear. 2016. https://medium.com/oxford-university/frightfriday-art-and-science-of-hope-and-fear-db3b2012735f (accessed 11 Jul 2025).
10. Razai MS. Artificial intelligence scribes in general practice: sacrificing the art of medicine for promised efficiency. Br J Gen Pract 2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp25X743001.
11. Mummery D. Artificial intelligence … or not? Br J Gen Pract 2025; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp25X743013.
Featured photo by Daniel Boberg on Unsplash.
