Bytheway... patients need humans, not computers
MORE AND more, artificial intelligence is being used with the diagnosis of diseases such as cancer.
I find myself worrying more and more about the enthusiasm for the technology revolution, with tools such as artificial intelligence and smartphones being used to reform medicine.
Robert Hutchison, a Scottish physician and medical author, who is in my top ten of greatest ever teachers, wrote this petition in his 82nd year: ‘From inability to let well alone; from too much zeal for the new and contempt for what is old; from putting knowledge before wisdom, science before art, and cleverness before common sense; from treating patients as cases; and from making the cure of the disease more grievous than the endurance of the same, good Lord, deliver us.’
For me, after spending a lifetime immersed in medicine, this still says it all.
Hutchison’s Clinical Methods, more than 120 years old and still printed today, was a cornerstone of our studies as trainee doctors. He emphasised how essential it is to understand every person fully, whatever their social class or ethnic origin, in order to unearth problems posed by disease.
It concerns me that so much care is no longer carried out face-to-face. The vital human touch is fading fast as we push for technological diagnosis, with treatment decisions laid down by protocols and accomplished by machines.
Just as every fingerprint is unique, so, too, must we respond to each patient’s disease and treatment with individuality.
I would think the push to improve medicine must be to personalise it, not simply to hand over more power to machines.