So much of what I know from women in my life is that the human element of medicine is almost a strict negative for them. As a guy it hasn't been much better, but at least doctors listen to me when I say something.

One doctor didn't want to give me ritalin, so i went to another one.

One was against it, the other one saw it as a good idea.

I would love to have real data, real statistics etc.

Because people believe that they know everything about humans and how they work (or they hedge it). This is the exact same reason I don't trust supposed "experts" claiming AI will replace all these jobs: those same experts have no idea what these jobs actually entail and just look at the job title (and maybe the description) but have not once actually worked those jobs. And there is a huge chasm between "You read the job description" and "you actually know what it is like to be in this position and you fully understand everything that goes into it".

> human problems can't be solved with technology

How are you defining technology? How are you defining human problems? Inventions are created to solve human problems, not theoretical problems of fictional universe. Do X-rays, refrigerators, phones and even looms solve problems for nonhumans?

Claiming something that sounds deep doesn’t make it an axiom.

Doctors are not necessarily great at talking to patients and patients are unhappy with the information Doctors provide. This moat has dried up.

It seems likely to me that doctors whose job is almost or entirely about making diagnoses and prescribing treatments won't be able to keep up in the long run, where those who are more patient facing will still be around even after AI is better than us at just about everything.

If I were picking a specialty now, I'd go with pediatrics or psychiatry over something like oncology.

If you read the study, the whole conclusion is much less spectacular than the article. What the article really pushes happened:

patients -> AI -> diagnosis (you know, with a camera, or perhaps a telephone I guess)

What REALLY happened

patients -> nurse/MD -> text description of symptoms -> MD -> question (as in MD asked a relevant diagnostic question, such as "is this the result of a lung infection?", or "what lab test should I do to check if this is a heart condition or an infection?") -> AI -> answer -> 2 MDs (to verify/score)

vs

patients -> nurse/MD -> text description of symptoms -> MD -> question -> (same or other) MD -> answer -> 2 MDs verify/score the answer

Even with that enormous caveat, there's major issues:

1) The AI was NOT attempting to "diagnose" in the doctor House sense. The AI was attempting to follow published diagnostic guidelines as perfectly as possible. A right answer by the AI was the AI following MDs advice, a published process, NOT the AI reasoning it's way to what was wrong with the patient.

2) The MD with AI support was NOT more accurate (better score but NOT statistically significant, hence not) than just the MD by himself. However it was very much a nurse or MD taking the symptoms and an MD pre-digesting the data for to the AI.

3) Diagnoses were correct in the sense that it followed diagnostic standards, as judged afterwards by other MDs. NOT in the sense that it was tested on a patient and actually helped a live patient (in fact there were no patients directly involved in the study at all)

If you think about it in most patients even treating MDs don't know the correct conclusion. They saw the patient come in, they took a course of action (probably wrote at best half of it down), and the situation of the patient changed. And we repeat this cycle until patient goes back out, either vertically or horizontally. Hopefully vertically.

And before you say "let's solve that" keep in mind that a healthy human is only healthy in the sense that their body has the situation under control. Your immune system is fighting 1000 kinds of bacteria, and 10 or so viruses right now, when you're very healthy. There are also problems that developed during your life (scars, ripped and not-perfectly fixed blood vessels, muscle damage, bone cracks, parts of your circulatory system having way too much pressure, wounds, things that you managed to insert through your skin leaking stuff into your body (splinters, insects, parasites, ...), 20 cancers attempting to spread (depends on age, but even a 5 year old will have some of that), food that you really shouldn't have eaten, etc, etc, etc). If you go to the emergency room, the point is not to fix all problems. The point is to get your body out of the worsening cycle.

This immediately calls up the concern that this is from doctor reports. In practice, of course, maybe the AI only performs "better" because a real doctor walked up to the patient and checked something for himself, then didn't write it down.

What you can perhaps claim this study says is that in the right circumstances AIs can perform better at following a MD's instructions under time and other pressure than an actual MD can.

"Human problems can't be solved with technology" is just wrong, unless you have narrower definitions of a "human problem" or "technology".

For instance, transportation is a "human problem". It's being successfully solved with such technologies as cars, trains, planes, etc. Growing food at scale is a "human problem" that's being successfully solved by automation. Computing... stuff could be a "human problem" too. It's being successfully solved by computers. If "human problems" are more psychological, then again, you can use the Internet to keep in touch with people, so again technology trying to solve a human problem.

Yes talking to a human is good and necessary. But for diagnostics humans are not good at it. I'm happy for to human to use a tricorder and then tell me the answer.

>Medicine is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", as any patient ever can attest to.

Humans (doctors/nurses) can still be there to make you feel the warmth of humanity in your darkest times, but if a machine is going to perform better at diagnosing (or perhaps someday performing surgery), then I want the machine.

Even now, I'll take a surgeon that's a complete jerk over a nice surgeon any day, because if they've got that job even as a jerk they've got to be good at their jobs. I want results. I'll handle hurt feelings some other time.

I think there's a real space there, and a lot of what e.g. nurses and doctors do is talking to humans, and that won't go away.

But two facts are also true: a) diagnosis itself can be automated. A lot of what goes on between you having an achy belly and you getting diagnosed with x y or z is happening outside of a direct interaction with you - all of that can be augmented with AI. And b), the human interaction part is lacking a great deal in most societies. Homeopathy and a lot of alternative medicine from what I can see has its footing in society simply because they're better at talking to people. AI could also help with that, both in direct communication with humans, but also in simply making a lot of processes a lot cheaper, and maybe e.g. making the required education to become a human facing medicinal professional less of a hurdle. Diagnosis becomes cheaper & easier -> more time to actually talk to patients, and more diagnosises made with higher accuracy.

Yeah... No. I can't possibly disagree with this view more.

I don't need to "talk to a human", I need a problem with my meatbag resolved.

> humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology

WTF are you talking about? Is this bait? You can't possibly mean this. Yes humans are social creatures, but what does that have to do with medicine? Are you talking about a priest, a witch doctor, a therapist? Because if you're not, that sentence is utter BS.

In psychotherapy patients tend to prefer talking to AI than a human therapist and rank the interaction higher.

LLMs are a distillation of human.

The human doesn't need to be as highly trained and paid as a doctor if the human is not performing tasks concordant with that training.

I cannot wait until doctors are fully automated. Shouldn’t be long now, hopefully just a few years.

You have 2 options

A) nice chatty friendly and cool doctor and can diagnose correctly 50% of the times. B) robotic ai that diagnoses 60% correctly.

What you chose? If you have a disease than can kill your, the ai is 20% more likely to help you and probably prevent. I can’t see too many people choosing human doctor. Anyway I’m sure there will be people that will chose doctor with 10% correctness vs a 100% ai no matter what.

I time is clear there very little human element.

Doctors talk to patients?

I know. I know. Part of it is that talking to patients on average is useless but still this can’t be really used for an argument against AI.

Still doctors can have a more broad picture of the situation since they can look at the patient as a whole; something the LLM can’t really synthesize in its context.

I would personally vastly, vastly prefer to go to a robot doctor, who diagnoses, treats and nurses me. What exactly do I need from a human here? Except of course being the one making the system.

Technology is on a generational 10,000 year run of non-stop successfully solving human problems.

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This is extreme cope.