• medical education
• medical journalism

Heading home from our summer holiday, the famous Edith Piaf song—imitated a thousand times, but never matched: ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ came on the radio. This song spent 7 weeks at the top of the French singles charts in 1960, which would imply that the sentiment chimed with the broader population. I thought I’d listen through rather than change channels and found myself wondering about the meaning of the lyric, based flimsily on my schoolboy French. The idea that the singer regrets nothing is interesting, and one quite alien to me. I suspect that if I began to list here the things that I regret having done, I’d fill the journal, and be a blubbing wreck by the end of it. I’m not, however, going to expand on the theme of major regrets here. Instead, I want to write about minor regrets.

Perhaps one of the the most common minor medical regrets is ‘Why did I do that test?’ Of course, those of us in referral services are also familiar with the situation where we regret (perhaps a little passive …