When I first started work as a doctor 30 years ago, 7-and-a-half-minute appointments were the norm. But this very much depended on where you worked. For a few years I worked at 6-minute intervals. People ask: how did you do it? The answer is, we just did. We also took our own bloods, did house calls in the middle of the day, referrals, acutes, and all the rest. We didn’t write much and the history and examination structure I had been taught at university was binned. Most of my undergraduate education was just plain wrong because illness never seemed to present in the …