Matt Morgan: Flip phones, flying cars, and 20 years of working in medicine

Twenty years of working in medicine is just long enough to realise how much things change and how little the core truths ever will. In 2004, in my first year as a doctor, we lived in a world defined by flip phones, Blockbuster video rentals, and towers of dusty CDs in plastic covers. Medicine involved paper notes, bleeps clipped to belts, and the art of deciphering doctors’ handwriting. Some things haven’t changed. Even this year’s Glastonbury headliners were the same artists I saw in my first year—although the past 20 years are now etched clearly into their faces, bodies, and voices. And mine.Fast forward two decades, and we live in an era of smartphones. Blockbuster has morphed into limitless film and TV streaming, and CDs have been replaced by music streaming platforms. In medicine, electronic health records and telemedicine have replaced messy handwriting, even if endless ward rounds remain. Yet,…