There is a man named Rashid. He is 52, a finance director, three daughters, golf on the weekends. He runs in paid features every month. Dubai this month, Riyadh the next, London after that. Different name, same stairs, same wife, same six months later.
Here is how the genre writes him:
“But over the past few months, he had begun to notice a tightness in his chest when climbing stairs, and a breathlessness he put down to age and long office hours. During a comprehensive executive health screening at [Clinic]’s state-of-the-art cardiac centre, doctors discovered something Rashid never expected. ‘He was a heart attack waiting to happen,’ explains [Dr Name]. ‘Heart disease is a silent killer.’ Today, six months on, Rashid says he feels better than he has in twenty years. ‘They didn’t just treat my heart. They gave me a second chance at life.’”
State of the art. Silent killer. A second chance at life. Every sentence approved by a committee and felt by no one. I have written this man a dozen times myself.
So I rewrote him the way I write:
52 years of age, Rashid is a Finance Director. He has three daughters and he plays golf on the weekends. Always careful of what he ate and never spent a night in a hospital. He was healthy, more so than other men his age. No tests had told him otherwise.
It started on the stairs. A breathlessness, a tightness in his chest. He blamed it on age and long office hours.
“Everyone in my line of work is tired, it has to be the stress”.
His wife, as wives usually do, did not accept that argument. She booked him a cardiac screening at [Clinic] and he went.
“He was a heart attack waiting to happen”, says [Dr Name], [Title] at [Clinic]. The screening found a major blockage in one of his main arteries. “Often, men over 40 wait until a warning to get their heart looked at. At that age, the event and the warning tend to happen at the same time.”
In the few days following the check, Rashid had a minimally invasive angioplasty, guided by imaging, done by [Clinic]’s Cardiac Specialists. He spent less than an hour on the table and was walking by the end of the evening.
Six months later, Rashid says he feels better than he has in the last twenty years. He is back on the golf course. He follows a heart programme the team at [Clinic] built for him. He also walked his first 5K with his daughters.
“Don’t wait for warnings that might not come, every friend of mine, I tell them the same thing”, Rashid says.
Rashid found out at a screening. A screening he did not want to go to. Most men are not that fortunate, they find out in an ambulance. If you are over 40, book a cardiac screening at [Clinic]. It takes a morning.
Better. The man opens the story instead of the diagnosis. The doctor says something a doctor would say. The ending stops selling and starts warning. Put the two side by side and mine wins.
And Rashid still does not exist.
The 5K has no date. The artery has no name. His wife saved his life and I never gave her one. The golf course could be any golf course on Earth. Everything in him was reverse engineered from the ending a clinic wanted, and every improvement I made is a deeper coat of paint on a man nobody can visit.
Craft cannot fix an invented patient. The rewrite is the proof. I am the better writer of the two, and all I did was lie to you more convincingly.
The fix is a real man. Asked real questions, with his consent and his surname, the artery named, the morning it was found named too. When the information is missing, a profile leaves a gap. This genre invents.
Somewhere in Dubai there is a real man who got off a real table and walked that same evening. The genre has never needed to meet him.
Second Draft is a series on the writing healthcare actually publishes, taken apart one specimen at a time. Every specimen is written by me; no clinic’s copy appears here. The first instalment took apart a physician bio.
I write hospital profiles, physician profiles, and patient stories built from direct interviews.