This a WBUR radio series starting today: In the first episode in our series Smarter health, we explore the potential of AI in health care — from predicting patient risk, to diagnostics, to just helping physicians make better decisions. It happens that I'm working on an essay regarding AI and the art of physical diagnosis by clinicians.
They offered to accept comments via their voicemail. Here's my submission:
Voicemail: 617-353-0683
Hello, My name is Bill Koslosky. I’m a retired physician and now a medical writer living in Omaha, Nebraska.
Once during my residency in general surgery, our team was assembled around a patient’s bed on morning rounds when the attending said, “Don’t just do something, stand there.” An obvious turnaround of a familiar phrase, but he wanted to make the point that as physicians in training we needed to sharpen our powers of observation when visiting with a patient. It wasn’t enough just to look at the notes and lab work in the chart. We needed to increase our abilities at physical diagnosis.
What comes to mind when we think of examples of powerful skills of observation and inference, is Sherlock Holmes, the fictional Arthur Conan Doyle character. Doyle studied medicine and was awarded a medical degree. Doyle admitted that Holmes was partially modeled on his former teacher Joseph Bell, a Scottish surgeon and lecturer. As an exercise to illustrate this, Bell would pick a stranger, and by observation, deduce his occupation and recent activities.
So while we anticipate increased powers of diagnosis through the use of AI, we shouldn’t minimize the art of close observation and physical diagnosis in the course of clinical practice.
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