I suspect my decision to become a doctor was made long before I was old enough to make decisions.

Blame the genes. Apparently, several generations of doctors in one family can do that to you.

I started spending time with patients in A&E after my second year of medical school. That was 36 years ago.

Thirty-six years inside medicine and healthcare. From emergency rooms and hospital wards to management offices and boardrooms.

And what has happened to medicine during those years is nothing short of extraordinary.

Medicine Has Never Had So Much to Offer

Consider just a few numbers.

Medical scientific literature is now growing at a pace that roughly doubles its volume every decade.

Put that into human terms. If medical education tried to keep pace simply by teaching us more, my six years of medical school might theoretically need to become twelve. And before long, eighteen.

Clearly, that isn’t the answer.

The US Food and Drug Administration approved 46 novel drugs in 2025 alone.

And by 2025, the FDA had authorised more than 1,300 AI-enabled medical devices.

Behind those numbers are discoveries and treatment possibilities that would have seemed like science fiction when I was a young doctor.

Cancer immunotherapy is perhaps one of the most striking examples. We can now use a patient’s own immune system to attack certain cancers, and in some patients with previously devastating prognoses, achieve durable responses that would once have been unimaginable.

And that’s just one field.

More Treatments, More Decisions, More Questions

We are living in what may be the best time in human history to become seriously ill.

A rather strange thing for a doctor to say.

And yet, while medicine has become extraordinarily sophisticated, being a patient has not necessarily become easier.

It’s a jungle out there.

Imagine walking into a supermarket.

Not your friendly neighbourhood grocery shop. A gigantic supermarket. The ultimate supermarket. One that carries practically every product imaginable.

You came for cheese.

Simple enough.

Except that you now face hundreds of possibilities.

Hard cheese. Soft cheese. Low-fat cheese. High-fat cheese. Organic cheese. Cheese from happy cows, free-range cows, small cows, possibly cows that listen to classical music.

French, Swiss, Spanish, Portuguese.

With herbs. Without herbs. White, yellow, spreadable, sliced, aged, fresh.

For sandwiches. For toast. For wine.

And somewhere, undoubtedly, a very expensive cheese promising to improve your longevity.

Eventually, you do what most of us do.

You buy the one you know. Or the cheapest. Or the French one, because you’re feeling sophisticated.

Perhaps the one you saw advertised on the Tube.

You leave with cheese.

But was it the right cheese for you?

Somewhere Along the Way, We Lost Sight of the Patient

Now replace the cheese with healthcare.

Replace the supermarket shelves with hospitals, consultants, diagnostic technologies, treatments and medical opinions.

You have a medical problem. How do you choose?

The consultant with the most impressive credentials?

The hospital with the strongest reputation?

The newest technology?

The doctor someone you trust recommended?

Or simply the one who is available, nearby, or covered by your insurance?

None of these choices is necessarily wrong.

But none guarantees that the choice is right for you.

The best consultant isn’t necessarily the best consultant for your particular problem. The newest technology isn’t necessarily the most appropriate one. And the most advanced treatment isn’t necessarily the treatment you need.

In the supermarket, a poor decision might leave you with an expensive cheese you don’t particularly enjoy.

In healthcare, the consequences can be considerably more serious.

And this is the paradox.

We have invested extraordinary resources, intelligence and human ingenuity in creating more medical knowledge, more sophisticated technology and more treatment possibilities.

But have we invested equally in helping people make sense of them?

In ensuring that someone understands not only the disease, but the person living with it?

Someone who can look beyond an individual consultation, investigation or intervention and understand how everything fits together?

Perhaps the challenge of modern healthcare is no longer simply what medicine can do.

It is knowing what medicine should do, for whom, when, and why.

And perhaps, just perhaps, in this enormous supermarket of modern medicine, what we increasingly need is not another product on the shelf.