‘Google… how to handle a crying child at the airport?’ This question will sound familiar to those cricket fans who watched the recent IPL matches. This might remind you of OpenAI’s ChatGPT ad, in which two people are stranded at the airport due to a flight delay. To pass the time, they have fun debates on games using voice commands. While they are arguing about cricket, a child behind them starts crying loudly. Moving away from the sports debate, the girl looks at her boyfriend and asks the same question. The boy keeps wondering what kind of question this is and the advertisement ends here. In a world where everyone is using AI assistants, doctors too should not be left behind. After all, no two days are the same for them. Every new day brings new patients and new problems. News from Western countries suggests that OpenEvidence AI app, which is a chatbot in the medicine field, has become increasingly popular among doctors. Most doctors in developed countries use it to ask specific medical questions or share ideas about a diagnosis. In May alone they used it for 3 crore questions and consultations. OpenEvidence became the front-runner in this field, as it uses only medical journals and high-quality research data to train its AI models. Summarizes the most likely diagnoses and also explains other important diagnoses that should not be overlooked. Each summary also provides links to original research articles. AI is certainly solving long-standing problems in medicine. Yet medical experts agree that initial enthusiasm should be accompanied by extreme caution. The rapid adoption of an app in a highly sensitive field like medicine has raised concerns among medical professionals about when and how the technology should be used. It also reminds of those days how young doctors were made to start working in big hospitals. Years ago, new doctors were asked to spend a week or more in small departments such as pathology and radiology. Not because they had no knowledge of the functioning of these departments, but they were made to experience how these departments work in a selected hospital. Pathologists often use different testing methods to confirm the diagnosis. For example, they first perform rapid screening tests for initial positive or negative detection, then use advanced technology for definitive and measurable results. Therefore, it is important for doctors to understand what process their prescribed tests go through. When the same sample is tested 20 times, there may be slight variations in the data due to standard deviation, equipment calibration, and chemicals (reagents) used. When doctors understand how the pathology department works, they are able to make better decisions in the best interest of the patient. In olden times, doctors would directly pick up the intercom and ask the pathologist how the test was done and why there was a difference in the results. Unfortunately, today the work pressure in big hospitals is so high from the very first day that young doctors are rarely taken to these departments. Even in India, I have seen many doctors using AI for initial information. Some doctors also have paid versions that generate quick medical summaries of a patient, but they still rely heavily on human input for accurate diagnoses. The bottom line is that undoubtedly AI brings forth a sea of information, but meeting people and learning from real-life situations still makes us better informed people. AI will be a great tool of the future for rapid knowledge transmission, but it should remain as an additional aid, not a substitute for human intelligence and mutual cooperation.
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N. Raghuraman’s column: In the world of AI, meeting people in person is still beneficial
