Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Mirror

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back Taik Hobson with his story Mirror — a hospital tale with a difference. Previously, he has written about what happens at Midnight at the A&E, a Strange machine and how Goliath falls. You con find out more about his work by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the inspiration behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays it read the story first.

Writing Mirror

During my internship I came to the unhappy conclusion that our prejudices as medical professionals — of others, but mostly of ourselves, magnified by the ever present threat of medical legal action should we falter — was a significant impediment to providing good patient care. This discounts the normal scope of challenges anyone can expect to face, regardless of their chosen workplace — of working closely with someone whose values we don’t agree with; of being the main care provider for a sick family member, or of having a medical condition ourselves; of being a single parent, or of simply having to go to work after another argument with a loved one.

Ask any health-care provider and they will tell you about that one person they know who is cool-headed, just, respectful of their colleagues, on time with their paperwork, has impeccable bedside manners and who came in to work on the morning their pet frog died and still found time to console the family of a deceased patient after attending to a successful resuscitation of a separate patient next door. In a perfect world this would be the rule rather than the exception.

The preposterousness of AI-augmented health care as an alternative has waned thanks to our growing awareness of the technology, even as our exclusively human-powered medical system continues to cough up signs of being unsustainable (at least for those in tertiary care settings). The example used in the story is not new, and may one day be commonplace. (I would also like to point out that the patient in the story is a product of the imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, cryonized or thawing, is purely coincidental. Those medical legal habits certainly don’t go quietly.)

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