I love the concept of the AI-assisted physician -- it feels like the focus right now is on how soon ChatGPT will replace us (look at how it passed the USMLE!) rather than how best we can team up. One very notable difference between board questions and real people is that the board questions generally give you only the relevant information you need, while a real patient encounter includes volumes of facts that don’t fit the diagnosis, aren’t pertinent, and could actually be factually incorrect or misremembered by the patient. Teasing that out, as they say, is the art of medicine.
Would have been interesting to put the patient's symptoms into AI and seen the result. Dr. Vinay Prasad has an interesting video where he breaks the practice of medicine into three components -- knowledge, human interaction and physical skill, e.g. surgery. His view is that AI has already or will soon surpass most doctors in the knowledge component, wont soon surpass what is hoped for but seldom delivered in the human interaction component and is not yet on the horizon in the physical skill component. Would be interesting to hear Dr. Bregman's thoughts.
Dear Dr. Bregman - as a layperson I always appreciate how much I learn from your essays and your insights. Your style of writing immediately pulls me in and along for the ride haha. Keep on fighting the good fight!
Brilliant and visionary. They are already moving in that direction with radiologists assisted by deep learning algorithms leading to much higher accuracy than radiologists alone or AI alone. Same with pathologists. Ideally in the future they would develop ChatGPT 'specialists', like ChatGPT Medicine, ChatGPT philosophy etc for a deeper dive. Then it could become a useful assistant in a doctor's office. One worry I have with that though, it's human nature to take shortcuts, there may be doctors relying too much on the machine, in turn altering their diagnosis process, resulting in possibly worse performance. The improvements will be in the other doctors that prefer to take the detour, the "scenic" route, to cover all bases, that's where AI can come to help when in a dilemma whether it's a horse or zebra or to catch any missed signals.
Nothing like a solid pitch for Primary Care. I read a study a while back that showed people diagnosed with cancer who continued to see their primary care doctor throughout treatment had better outcomes than those who did not. So, did you present the GCA patient to Chat GPT? Curious to know if she would make the right diagnosis?!
When I was in college a close friend went into the hospital a number of times with abdominal pain. She was treated and released several times - the doctors at the prominent university hospital were convinced she had some sort of rare blood disease. In the end - appendicitis. She got her appendix out and never looked back.....
I love the concept of the AI-assisted physician -- it feels like the focus right now is on how soon ChatGPT will replace us (look at how it passed the USMLE!) rather than how best we can team up. One very notable difference between board questions and real people is that the board questions generally give you only the relevant information you need, while a real patient encounter includes volumes of facts that don’t fit the diagnosis, aren’t pertinent, and could actually be factually incorrect or misremembered by the patient. Teasing that out, as they say, is the art of medicine.
Would have been interesting to put the patient's symptoms into AI and seen the result. Dr. Vinay Prasad has an interesting video where he breaks the practice of medicine into three components -- knowledge, human interaction and physical skill, e.g. surgery. His view is that AI has already or will soon surpass most doctors in the knowledge component, wont soon surpass what is hoped for but seldom delivered in the human interaction component and is not yet on the horizon in the physical skill component. Would be interesting to hear Dr. Bregman's thoughts.
Dear Dr. Bregman - as a layperson I always appreciate how much I learn from your essays and your insights. Your style of writing immediately pulls me in and along for the ride haha. Keep on fighting the good fight!
Shana Tovah 💓
Brilliant and visionary. They are already moving in that direction with radiologists assisted by deep learning algorithms leading to much higher accuracy than radiologists alone or AI alone. Same with pathologists. Ideally in the future they would develop ChatGPT 'specialists', like ChatGPT Medicine, ChatGPT philosophy etc for a deeper dive. Then it could become a useful assistant in a doctor's office. One worry I have with that though, it's human nature to take shortcuts, there may be doctors relying too much on the machine, in turn altering their diagnosis process, resulting in possibly worse performance. The improvements will be in the other doctors that prefer to take the detour, the "scenic" route, to cover all bases, that's where AI can come to help when in a dilemma whether it's a horse or zebra or to catch any missed signals.
Nothing like a solid pitch for Primary Care. I read a study a while back that showed people diagnosed with cancer who continued to see their primary care doctor throughout treatment had better outcomes than those who did not. So, did you present the GCA patient to Chat GPT? Curious to know if she would make the right diagnosis?!
Another fantastic read!
So good.
Great column as always, Dr. Bregman.
When I was in college a close friend went into the hospital a number of times with abdominal pain. She was treated and released several times - the doctors at the prominent university hospital were convinced she had some sort of rare blood disease. In the end - appendicitis. She got her appendix out and never looked back.....