Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. The world of general practice is made up of narratives that are both present and absent at the same time. We are taught to sift through our patients’ stories looking for the golden nuggets — crushing chest pain, headaches, sore throats — that might indicate pathology. Even as experience teaches us the importance of understanding the specific stories our patients bring us, our medical records and funding encourages us to strip away stories and keep only the codable. Our guidelines encourage us to use standardised tools to score symptoms and keep them safely away from any stories. Essentially our medical records can become descriptions of our patients …