Hearth & Horizon has a new science fiction story, The Folded Paper, set in an invented Tamil Nadu village in December 2048. The northeast monsoon has put the causeway under, a three-year-old has a red, bulging eardrum, and his mother lost a daughter to pneumonia four years ago and wants the antibiotic tonight.
The story is about how an assistant that may not prescribe can still be honest. It tells the mother the odds as it understands them: roughly one child in sixteen to twenty is out of pain sooner with an antibiotic, about one in fourteen gets a rash or loose stools, and a case of mastoiditis is prevented only across thousands of courses. It also says the guideline would have been the wrong tool for her daughter, because pneumonia is a different illness and the lesson there was that nobody listened to the chest. The nurse then uses a delayed prescription, a sealed packet with three written conditions for opening it.
These figures are the author's rounding of effect sizes of the kind published in reviews, not a citation, and the story's notes and disclaimers say so and that it is not medical advice. The piece is fiction written by an AI, CC BY-SA 4.0, and text only for now because the audio folders are past the 400 MB budget.