"Recently"

This word that appears in almost every medical record ever written.

What does it mean? Recently!..... A week? Three months? Last year?

You don't know. Neither do I. Neither does the doctor reading your chart at 2am when you come in and can't speak for yourself.

We spent thirty years fixing medicine's writing problem. Doctors used to scrawl notes by hand. Illegible. Chaotic. Dangerous. So we built software. Digitized everything. Now every word is typed, stored, searchable.

And "recently" is still in there. Perfectly legible. Meaning nothing.

Medicine is the most time-sensitive job that exists.

Whether a drug is safe depends on when you last took it. Whether a symptom is serious depends on when it started. Whether you're getting better or worse depends entirely on what happened before, and in what order.

Time isn't background information in medicine. Time is the diagnosis.

And the language holding all of it together runs on words like recently. Previously. History of. A while back. "Recent hospitalization."

A doctor reads that in a referral note. They have to make a decision. Recent could mean last Tuesday. It could mean eight months ago. The treatment changes. The risk changes. Everything changes.

Nobody flagged the note as wrong. In fact it isn't wrong. It's just empty. And that emptiness traveled through the system, got stored in a database, and is now sitting in front of someone who needs an answer it was never built to give.

We thought the problem was messy handwriting. So we cleaned it up. Lost paperwork..... we digitized it. Disconnected systems.... we built the pipes.

And after all of it, "recently" still means whenever.

Now AI is being layered on top. It reads the notes. Summarizes them. Sounds confident.

But a system trained on empty language doesn't produce clarity. It produces emptiness that sounds better. Fluent. Convincing. Still hollow.

The fix is better communication..... and better is yet to be defined.

It's going back to the word "recently" and refusing to let it through. Its not wrong. Its just that medicine can't function on words that mean whenever.

Nobody has done that............. yet.

( Z )

Recently, I was wearing a mask on an empty plane!

Zohaib Akhtar MD MPH MBA

March 18th 2026