I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

This is true, but it’s also a different skill than writing is. There are people who write well enough but are terrible editors. I fear for them in the generative AI workplace.

When a big mistake has happened and you need to apologize, it had better be coming from you yourself. If you think you can improve it by delegating it to a fancy autocorrect software, you're missing the point of why we apologize. Or if you think a bot is more 'empathetic' than a human paying attention, you've lost touch with what it means to be empathetic. A bot can't even feel, let alone feel your situation vicariously.

But I'll address "I'd expect it work just as well as it would with software engineers."

This is not a great comparison. Orally presenting patients to peers and explanation to non-experts is a core skill of medical training and fundamental to clinical practice. Understanding the essential fundamentals of a handful of extremely common conditions that can be explained in simple terms is something that the majority of doctors will have to do thousands of times throughout residency possibly at the tail end of a 24. [I'm actually not in favor of it - because it often borders or is hazing with little verified educational value - but a historically common and still present practice in some places is making the intern present critically ill patients to the day team and attending after they are coming off of a 24 hour shift without any notes. Speaking of context switches, they will often have 5 or more patients like this. Even if not this extreme, the point is, doctor and software engineer training have little overlap (eg why numerous fools trying to make the next stack overflow for MDs have never succeeded).

As for this example, I can't overemphasize how common pulmonary edema and volume overload are presenting findings in the ED. This is like an experienced programmer going to ChatGPT to explain the addition operator in Javascript, which you could do, but would it be unfair to expect someone to come up with an explanation on the spot? Maybe, but then probably medicine is not a career for you. It does emphasize a different set of skill sets. And yes picked that example on purpose, because maybe one doesn't remember all the stupid implicit type conversion rules but one can still come up with a basic explanation.

As a doctor with a mixed socio-economic patient population if I just say "your family member has pulmonary edema" I'm already getting a fucking blank stare much of the time, especially if it is new. I might as well just tell them they have dropsy. I can even tailor patient education to the audience as well after 10 years of doing this for a living, maybe someone wants an ELI6 (it is often the tech people, some of them are alright - though that crowds tends to often want the iamverysmart explanation - or like many on this site just explain why I'm an idiot that knows their field less than they do).

As for specialty, people go into pathology and radiology for instance to avoid all this once done with medical school, but that is only a portion of doctors. ELI5 is relative too - consulting subspecialists and radiologists must ELI5 to their more generalist colleagues.

> asking them to context-switch on the spot

I mean this is part and parcel of hospital medicine. 5 years out of residency one can easily run through a list and handoff 20 patients with a few notes on a single sheet of paper, whereas a medical student will often have an awkward folding clipboard with a ream of notes for their 3 patients.

> If I was subject to random ELI5 requests during a busy work period, you'd bet I'd start preparing notes up front

I need a few notes to remind me of a patient's clinical status in reference to their core problems. I absolutely do not need notes on how to converse with patient's which are 99% of the time the same things over and over. Despite what's on TV, medicine is overwhelmingly routine - the drama is usually the social issues.

> and probably put them on a Wiki, and then give the people asking me a link to that wiki, and politely tell them to RTFM and GTFO

Yeah, the starting point of this approach for the typical doctor and the typical techie are unsurprisingly starkly different. Telling patients to "RTFM" isn't particular winning -- and there is a whole field of academic study simply related to Patient Education.