“A boy saw 17 doctors over 3 years for chronic pain. ChatGPT found the diagnosis,” says the Today show.
On one hand, one could blame the modern practice of allopathic medicine, in which physicians have been turned into accountants and data input technicians, and it is true that the AMA and individual doctors have gotten into bed with a bunch of skeevy characters like insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. However, we need doctors. Human doctors.
As an acupuncturist I don’t just love allopathic medicine, but it will save your life in some situations, and we need to continue to support that system and its practitioners. Everyone has a story about being wronged by some doctor, but for the most part they are highly trained, highly competent and caring people who work ungodly hours under intense pressure. My hat is sincerely off to them, as individuals. However, the system of medicine they and their partners have created has become yet another tentacle of the hypenated-industrial complex, in which human beings are only cogs in the machine. It was bad enough when the patients were cogs, but making the physicians into cogs, too, will have all kinds of terrible ramifications.
Physicians have all kinds of power — to involuntarily commit you, to take away your driver’s license, to make you lose a professional license — do you really think that power would be better placed in the hands of an artificial intelligence? If you’ve had your concerns brushed aside by a seemingly indifferent human physician at some point in your life, imagine how that would go with an honest to Goddess, by-definition-indifferent AI entity.
Medicine is where the rubber hits the road, technologically speaking. We can all ooh and ahh about Mars rovers and new computer chips, but when your child is acting sick and crazy you don’t care about how they get better, just that they get better. In the first place this makes people very susceptible to manipulation, and sadly, many doctors do manipulate their patients, especially with fear. This sometimes leads to ill-advised surgeries, inappropriate medications and other negative outcomes that contribute to people’s distrust of doctors. However, those who seek a better way (such as acupuncture or other alternatives) usually realize that the key is to not let anyone manipulate you. Managing our own care is the name of the game, but it seems to be too much work for some people — they’d rather have an easier answer — and this leads to more unfortunate outcomes, when people browbeat their doctors into the med they saw on TV or the procedure their brother in law had. Such people might assume that it would be “easier” to have AI take care of their healthcare, but STILL, we are better off with human doctors.
Medicine, whatever form is practiced, is where science and art come together — science tends to scorn art, and patients tend to revere science, but think for a moment about your actual positive and negative medical outcomes. The positive ones are varied, but frequently include a doctor understanding something about us and acting on that understanding to try to help us. “Understanding” is a big term, and includes context — not just that this person is 33 years old, female, obese and diabetic, but also that she just left an abusive marriage and has a tenuous living situation with roommates. Good physicians are good scientists, but they also have a good feel to them. I, of course, practice body/mind/spirit medicine, where “feel” isn’t a detail, but is central to the approach, both in diagnosis and treatment. But everyone knows that a good physician, too, understands on some level that the patient is a human being with human feelings and concerns, and you almost always get better results when you keep that context in mind. Negative outcomes, on the other hand, are frequently very similar — a doctor gets an idea fixed in their head and charges ahead, regardless of the concerns of the patient.
For some reason, misanthropes tend to lead the way where allopathic culture is concerned — from the multiply-addicted father of modern surgery, William Halsted, to the fictionally-addicted Dr. House, we seem to want or need grumpy and obsessive people to tell us what to do with our health. This is kind of like people’s general expectation that artists will be childish and mercurial — they don’t have to be, but society’s expectations (and indulgence) make it easier for them to behave this way. Unfortunately, this back and forth between the expectations of patients and the pressures on doctors has led to the current position where it seems, to thoughtless people, like we could solve a bunch of problems by just turning healthcare over to computers, who will “just give us the facts.” Their assumptions are, “no more malpractice, no more impaired physicians, no more waits for appointments,” but the outcomes will include no person there to take responsibility when mistakes occur (because they will); malfunctioning machines; and even more of an assembly line approach to medicine with no second opinions needed or allowed, because all the machines will be programmed the same way, for safety and equity’s sake. Furthermore, this will diminish yet another profession requiring education, which plays into the hands of the wealthy elites who are threatened by educated people, and who, additionally, will be the only ones who can afford AI doctorbots, creating either scarcity of or monopoly over healthcare.
Go hug your doctor. Even if they aren’t the warm and fuzzy type. The AI version will probably tase you if you try, put you on a worldwide blacklist and report you to the police for tampering with a medical device.