Doctors may find themselves obsolete a lot sooner

I WISH medical doctors dropped the “God of all I survey” and “I’m so busy I’ve got thousands of lives to save” shtick many of them have got going, and their annoying and patronising attitude that patients and their families don’t understand anything and are irritations to be “managed”.

It was old 30 years ago. Perhaps their nurses and a few adoring patients are still impressed, but these days most people, I think, find their self-styled superiority passé.

I have a very good GP, who takes the “patient-centred approach” seriously. But strangely this is not and was not universally a characteristic of South Africa’s public health service.

A former chief executive of Groote Schuur Hospital told me this a few years ago, something he said he was trying to change during his unfortunately short stay (national government head-hunted him).

If patients and their families are not at the front and centre of what doctors and hospitals do, what is their purpose?

We’re in the age of Google and AI (artificial intelligence) medicine (and almost everything else under the sun) where patients can look up illnesses and injury, and depending on the site, get amateur to expert-level descriptions of symptoms and treatment.

Of course, like looking for any referral be it a plumber or brain surgeon, one must treat these sites with caution. The responsible ones prominently say they don’t replace qualified medical opinion, i.e. a real person.

Some doctors are irritated and threatened by “Dr Google” and others amused. Recently, my GP was mildly amused when I told her I had “consulted” Dr G the day before.

And you know what: Dr G’s “diagnosis” of my symptoms (keywords entered) was spot on. In fact, the internet is a marvellous resource and I’ve obtained information about real medical and veterinary conditions human professionals have either forgotten to give me, or not considered.

One treatment option I found on the internet, a homeopathic remedy, made a major difference to a discomforting chronic condition that normal medicine had not properly informed me of and was unable to help with (much later I learned the big-pharma drug of the exact same ingredient cost R800 for 30 tablets vs R90 for 60 tablets at the health shop). Sure, it’s not always right because there’s a physical, human element that’s missing – clinical examinations and tests – with the internet. But we’re getting there.

Already there’s an AI that provides basic legal advice. In medicine, remote surgeries are being performed. There are smartphone apps for monitoring basic vital signs, eg pulse rate for fitness fanatics. In The Conversation there was a recent article about an app being developed that can detect if animals are unhappy and in pain by measuring their facial expressions.

In sci-fi films like Prometheus and Passengers there’s an “auto-doc” that offers a one-stop medical service – diagnosis, scans, medication and surgery.

While the internet cannot yet perform surgery, an AI app that measures vital signs and body fluids and offers treatment solutions, with online scripts for medication, can’t be far away. Some already exist in parts.

Already the internet is a threat to former specialists of all disciplines – doctors are not the only ones afflicted by the hubris gene – who must contend with lay people knowledgeable and selftaught via Wikipedia and YouTube on formerly esoteric subjects. But if doctors especially continue to treat people the way they do, they may find they’re obsolete a lot sooner than those lawyers AIs are thankfully replacing.