Many doctors will be replaced by AI. All they do is diagnose and prescribe meds. AI can do it faster, cheaper, and with fewer mistakes.
The few doctors who treat the person and not his symptom and who have not reduced themselves to being a prescription pad will remain. The rest won’t be needed.
This is something even for our times:
Professor who praised Hamas attacks to teach Columbia course on Zionism
RE AI replacing doctors, I would rather go to a human doctor even if he “mainly diagnoses and prescribes meds.” What should he do?
What do you mean by treating the person and not his symptom? Psychological help?
It’s not doctors’ fault they’re given 10 minutes or less per patient or that our Israeli hospitals are overcrowded. (I don’t talk about private medicine here.)
The neoliberal recipe proceeds as usual: first, degrade public services, and then replace them with AI or cancel them altogether.
As for making doctors veer off-script, my aunt had a medical emergency just two days ago. To get to ER, she needed a human doctor from a medical center to give her a paper sending her to ER without having to pay a huge sum of money for this visit. After my mother talked in Hebrew with a human doctor and he checked my aunt, she did persuade him to give this paper. With AI you cannot talk, persuade, nothing.
Imagine AI telling you “to receive this prescription OR continuestart your treatment do medical procedure Y” that you don’t want or cannot do. Like have a certain vaccine or lose X weight or take medicine you’re allergic to.
Do you trust AI translators to replace all human translators right now? Why think the complex field of medicine can be managed by today’s AI?
What happens when AI makes a mistake? With human doctors one can go to another specialist, but with AI?
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Treating the person and not the symptom goes like this:
A woman experiences extreme joint pain around her period. This is ascribed as a gynecological issue solely because of the timing. Separately, the woman is diagnosed with a precursor to RA based on blood tests and other clinical evaluations. But because it’s so early, some doctors won’t treat without the patient being more symptomatic. The patient has been led to believe that this joint pain is caused by her period. It turns out it’s autoimmune, and she qualifies for treatment. In that case, the patient is being evaluated for one symptom and shunted toward gynecology—but other symptoms get tested for and the patient is correctly given to rheumatology. But by treating the symptoms as two separate things, the woman almost doesn’t get the treatment she needs.
That woman was me, and I’m so thankful to the provider who asked me if sometimes I wake up feeling like I’m 90, independent of the timing of that pain.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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