Medicine is no longer an intuitive game. The best results come from following rigorously tested algorithms, not intuition. Research, on the other hand, is where the creativity is and that should continue to be done by humans.
source?
Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#32Enhanced by, assisted by, supported by, reminded by, taught by - yes, sure
Replaced by? Do me a favour.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#33No, they really don't. I'm married to a physician and I can tell you that Medicine is an incredibly nuanced profession, and though doctors and nurses can benefit greatly from computer assistance, they cannot be reliably and safely replaced by computer algorithms. The single data point of Watson diagnosing lung cancer is not enough to generalize over the entire profession and range of ailments. Medicine is a great dea…
You may well be right, but nevertheless, where medical care can be automated, it should be. Because otherwise medical care never gets more affordable. The economy doubles in size, wages double in the general economy, and ... doctors wages double. As long as we consider medicine an elite profession (so that we don't train an overabundance of doctors and drive the wages down, which most of us wouldn't want to do) emplo…
Almost none of the prescriptions you offer have any measurable impact on healthcare spend.
Blood pressure readings -> performed by $18 Medical Assistants
Step by step diagnosis -> office visits are Now, what actually costs money is getting your spine surgery at Stanford rather than the outpatient clinic which costs more than getting physical therapy. It takes a person (often a doctor) to help guide a scared patient towards the most effective option, not the most expensive one. We, as patients, are not experts, so we choose the expensive option as the best proxy for quality. Computers can't engage in a meaningful discussion.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether evidence is easy or hard to gather is a red herring. Patients present a body of evidence. Small or large, that evidence is what doctors and machines both use to generate diagnoses. The places where machines have the potential to excel is situating the evidence within a broader universe of evidence. The human body is amazingly complex, and it's unfair to hold it against human doctors that they don't have the c…
>Whether evidence is easy or hard to gather is a red herring. No it's not, it's incredibly relevant. How can you take an evidence-based approach to newborn and infant care when no studies have been done? How do you run studies ethically on infants who can't give consent? Are you willing to subject a baby to an untested delivery procedure, that could potentially go very very wrong, or would you rather stick with the d…
> How can you take an evidence-based approach to newborn and infant care when no studies have been done?
What do you call the alternative? And why can't computers be trained to do it, too?
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#35Other posts by this author: "Programmers need to be replaced by computers...no more buggy code!" "Lawyers need to be replaced by computers--no more sleazy ambulance chaser ads!" "Money needs to grow on trees! No more financial problems!"
I know this is sarcasm, but law seems like a great candidate for automation. The law is literally a set of rules. And in the process of automating legal stuff, we might be forced to clean up some existing instances of ambiguity and vagueness. Wouldn't that be nice? Regarding programmers, much of their job already is to replace themselves with computers. Once a task becomes routine, you should automate it. Regarding m…
>I know this is sarcasm, but law seems like a great candidate for automation. The law is literally a set of rules. And in the process of automating legal stuff, we might be forced to clean up some existing instances of ambiguity and vagueness. Wouldn't that be nice?
Lovely. Unfortunately, most of the practice of law is arguing over its interpretation.
If we can automate product management (giving vague instructions to a computer that can figure out exactly what you want from it), we can automate law.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#36Simplistic article to say the least.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#37I hear people saying that medicine can't have doctors be replaced by computers and it's more of an art than a science. I'd like to get more information and see why they think that and if their reasons really hold up. It intuitively seems to me computers can do a better job. Here are a few reasons: 1) When you think about what a doctor does, they use a combination of their memory, experience, knowledge and judgment. 2…
You've hit a minor portion of what a doctor actually does, the differential diagnosis.
At my last business (in sleep medicine), we learned that our patients who met their long term respiratory therapist (RT) before their differential diagnosis had a 20% higher adherence rate than patients who met their RT afterwards.
Concentrating on the Dx is a common desire of the bay area crowd but the reality is we value human relationships. A computer with the best differential diagnosis capabilities will under perform a reasonably competent doctor with empathy simply because patients are more likely to adhere to the prescribed treatment regimen.
now, augmenting doctors with additional information is a different story. I've spent the last 10 years of my life working on that problem.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#38No, they really don't. I'm married to a physician and I can tell you that Medicine is an incredibly nuanced profession, and though doctors and nurses can benefit greatly from computer assistance, they cannot be reliably and safely replaced by computer algorithms. The single data point of Watson diagnosing lung cancer is not enough to generalize over the entire profession and range of ailments. Medicine is a great dea…
The fact that the discipline is incredibly nuanced is precisely why I want computers doing the heavy lifting, at least when it comes to diagnosis. I find it extremely hard to believe that even the best doctors could come close to touching the accuracy of an expert system. Now, obviously there is still the necessity of a trained and skilled doctor. A doctor should always have the last decision (before the patient, tha…
If an expert system prescribed you extra strength Tylenol would you feel better?
I think you are taking a too simplistic view of diagnosis and put to much faith in AI. I have also noticed Watsons good results, but I do not trust them yet, there is a lack of evidence supporting the claim that Watson can make 90% correct diagnosis.
Medical imaging is a big part of diagnosis, especially in many cancer patients. There is a huge effort to automate the segmentation of tumors, and even though algorithms often have higher inter- and intra-observability agreement than radiologists, they often fail miserably for "non-standard" tumors. A fully automated system that scans the patient, make the diagnosis and treatment plans and provides treatment is very far future.
A completely different issue is that the specific combination of a highly developed brain and opposable thumbs are sometimes necessary. Consider cardiac response teams in hospitals, but also general patient care where the ability to fluff a pillow can be just as important as placing a quick IV drop.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tend to agree about the accuracy of diagnoses when the data is good. Here's the 'but': I think my main reason for distrusting computer diagnosis is that computers are still pretty terrible at figuring out what we are telling them, and patients are also pretty terrible at describing what symptoms they're suffering from. It's all very well to aim a camera at some sort of visible symptom, but what happens when there's…
Of course we will still need a doctor to perform the tests. But they'll be relying much more on the apps to suggest to them what tests to perform next. The patients won't be telling the computer anything, esp the unconscious patients, and photos won't be analyzed by computers. Idiocracy was a cool movie :)
To be flippant it's starting to sound like you're describing the canned question list in a call center :)
The computer analysis of photos was actually something I thought was quite positive. I believe they've been doing this for skin cancer for a while (based on what my mother, who worked in a skin clinic for a few years described to me, before she escaped to do GP work again).
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#40No, they really don't. I'm married to a physician and I can tell you that Medicine is an incredibly nuanced profession, and though doctors and nurses can benefit greatly from computer assistance, they cannot be reliably and safely replaced by computer algorithms. The single data point of Watson diagnosing lung cancer is not enough to generalize over the entire profession and range of ailments. Medicine is a great dea…
The fact that the discipline is incredibly nuanced is precisely why I want computers doing the heavy lifting, at least when it comes to diagnosis. I find it extremely hard to believe that even the best doctors could come close to touching the accuracy of an expert system. Now, obviously there is still the necessity of a trained and skilled doctor. A doctor should always have the last decision (before the patient, tha…
I can't see the part in your story where you found out what the chest pain was and that any form of diagnosing entity [sh|w]ould have picked it up.