Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
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Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#2No, 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 deal more than differential diagnoses, doctors are a great deal more than "professional diagnosers", and nurses are a great deal more than morphine dispensing diaper-changing automatons.
Most medical schools (in my country, at least) have moved to an entirely evidence-based and patient-centred-care model years ago. The problem of course is that evidence is not always easily gathered because of ethical issues (e.g. most hypothermia knowledge comes from Nazi human experimentation on POWs and Jews. Also it's hard to conduct a study on OB/GYN topics because you could potentially be putting infants, fetuses, and their mothers at undue risk). Being treated by a computer is not going to change this problem of poor evidence.
That forum post was written by someone who has only a shallow appreciation for/understanding of the field of medicine.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#3No, 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) employing medical staff will always cost some approximately fixed multiple of the median hourly wage. And medical care is and has always been too expensive to provide proper care for the entire population. If, for instance, we can automate doctors taking blood pressure readings, by giving patients their own sensor, or automate the drawn out process of step-by-step diagnosis by driving down blood cost prices so that 50%, 5% and 1% diagnoses can be explored simultaneously, or have automated machines which allow frail, elderly patients to bathe without needing a nurse, then we can really start to improve care, and decrease cost (which, in any case, will simply be reallocated to dealing with other ailments). Doctors lose nothing, but, step-by-step, the general population gains immeasurably.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#4absolutely.
case in point: automated call centers. so much better than a human being. instant recognition of what i need, how to help me - simply awesome.
i can see it now - press 1 if you're stomach hurts, 2 if your leg hurts ... OPERATOR!
machines work great when steering and diagnosing other machnes? the fuzzy and subjective human condition? not so much.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#5No, 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…
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 capabilities to use the enormous amount of information we've collected on it so far. Machines do, though, and they're already on the brink of matching or exceeding human capabilities.
It's true that medicine is more than generating diagnoses. But the years of training and huge personnel costs are caused by the advanced levels of knowledge required to perform with competence. The deprofessionalization of medicine means you can substitute expensive labor with much cheaper labor.
There's also the value that comes from standardization. The best human doctors are probably going to surpass machine doctors in their chosen field of expertise for awhile yet. But very few people have access to the best human doctors, and the best human doctor in one area of specializaton is unlikely to be exceptional in areas outside his or her specialization. The proper comparison isn't against the best doctors, or even the average doctors: it's against the worst doctors who make terrible errors in judgment and doctors working outside their area of expertise, whose work will be most easily replaceable by Watson-like software.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#6No, 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…
> And medical care is and has always been too expensive to provide proper care for the entire population.
Which countries are you talking about here? (I agree with your general sentiment, though.)
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#7I 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) Computers can remember a lot more relevant facts and wonmt forget them.
3) A doctor's experience is just with their own patients and what they hear at conferences and the literature they read. A computer network can literally aggregate experiences of many different doctors and cases around the world. A new superbug coming out, for instance, may have a treatment that few doctors know, because it's more prevalent in another country -- but a person using the network will be made aware of this treatment. The network will have much more experience than an individual. It will aggregate the outcomes of many therapies and studies.
4) The knowledge of the network can be extracted from the experiene and be much more extensive. Both beause the experence is extensive and because various methods of statistical analysis can be employed. A doctor isn't going to sit there and cross reference worldwide statistics on the success of using remedy X given factors of race, gender, age, etc. The computers can.
5) Finally, the judgment. Here is why the computers can beat a doctor's "gut" overall. They can cross correlate the knowledge from all around the world and find the most major factors. Then given the symptoms, race, age, location, etc. they can suggest the possible diagnoses given realtime epidemiological statistics and the additional tests that need to be done to establish which diagnosis is most probable. In many cases this establish a path to just one diagnosis with statistical accuracy exceeding what one doctor can produce. It can also list the next several possible diagnoses and the tests to establish them. After the diagnosis is established, it can find the therapies along with risk factors gleaned from all the relevant outcomes from around the world.
And this is just for conventional medicine. When we get into genetic therapies, computers and information science will become a huge part of medicine.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#8No, 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, that is), but the doctor should be trained to understand how expert systems work. And of course, doctors and nurses will be needed to gather information from the patient, both through medical tests and verbal questioning.
The fact is, every time I have gone to the doctor for anything other than an obvious diagnosis (e.g. I need stitches in the hand because it is cut and bleeding), I have been appalled at the experience. I experienced fairly serious chest pain at the age of 26, with no history of health problems. I quickly read online about all the things it could be, ranging in seriousness from reflux to a heart attack, and I expected a doctor to have some sort of academic methodology, or do something vaguely resembling science, but instead, they x-rayed me, said everything looks fine, and prescribed me extra strength Tylenol. I wish doctors would at least pretend that they're doing something that a walk-in x-Ray booth attached to a computer system couldn't do.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#9No, 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 are overestimating the skills of an average doctor. I'm sure your spouse is very skilled, but there have been other success stories facts besides lung cancer when it comes to the diagnosis and treatment http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1301/1301.2158.pdf: "The results shown here demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach relative to human decision-making performance. Even in its early stages of development, such an AI framework easily outperforms the current treatment-as-usual case-rate/fee-for-service models of healthcare."
I'm not sure what the difficulties in gathering additional evidence do to support your argument? The doctors have huge difficulties even with following explicit guidelines and existing studies.
Re: Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> And medical care is and has always been too expensive to provide proper care for the entire population. Which countries are you talking about here? (I agree with your general sentiment, though.)
I know there are issues which are specific to the States, but I would say this applies almost everywhere. Almost everywhere doctors are paid 5-10 times the median wage, because they are chosen from the top few percent of students, and that difference in wages introduces an inherent asymmetry in how many hours of work are necessary to buy an hour of a doctor's time. The majority of the population, certainly as people age, have low level health issues which they manage imperfectly. You don't exercise enough because your knee is a bit gammy (perhaps requiring physiotherapy or knee surgery), your cholesterol is high, cancer is spotted six months later than necessary because you thought your dodgy stomach or sore throat was just something minor, etc, etc. And, you know, even in countries with good health provision for the poor, the middle-class still get much better care, because they talk to their doctor friends, know how the system works, research their options thoroughly, and so on. Perfectly reasonable behaviour, but the fact that it is necessary shows up the gap and the inherent limits in provision. The cheaper healthcare is, the higher the baseline and the average can rise.