From the ‘lovely’ 62-year-old Mrs Smith, to the ‘delightful’ Mr Jones presenting with a painful right knee, many GPs have a shorthand way of referring to their nicer patients in their notes and referral letters.

But a US doctor is suggesting these terms have had their day, and it’s time to move on from including an appreciation of a patient’s personality or disposition in their medical notes.

In a blog on the New England Journal of Medicine’s Journal Watch newsletter, Professor Paul Cox wonders whether referring to patients as ‘pleasant’, ‘lovely’ or even ‘delightful’ in patient notes is a bit patronising or demeaning.

“Am I just being curmudgeonly and negative?” asks the professor of medicine from Harvard Medical School and a contributing editor at the NEJM.