Of course AI could replace doctors. Some people will always prefer the bedside manner a person provides, but many others won't care, and AI will eventually do a good job at imitating a good doctor's bedside manner.
The only way AI is going to replace doctors is if medical technology advances to the point where you can repair a human as well as you can repair a machine (or someone invents AGI, I guess)
There are just too many unknowns and fiddly things going on with human bodies
edit: Haha, I guess Tex's sibling comment makes a good point though..
Most of what the doctor is doing is a type of modern shamanism though. Person doesn't feel good, so the doctor orders a useless test, test comes back negative so the person feels better. Then we complain health care cost too much.
10 full blood panel samples a year with other bio-metric data and a data set of 20 million people to do classification on would crush the doctor over time.
This bullshit health system though makes it impossible to have any real innovation at a mass scale. We will never have personal higher frequency medical data in my lifetime that would actually hugely improve the system and cut most of the cost out.
The hard part in medicine isn't diagnosis and it's not performing the surgeries, it's disease prevention, it's working with patients to find treatment plans they can tolerate, and it's coordinating all of the moving parts (skilled nursing facilities, pharmacies, inpatient rehab facilities, outpatient rehab facilities, durable medical equipment, home health care, insurance companies) to deliver care that results in a good outcome. Where hospital care falls apart is when labs/tests don't get performed in a timely manner and when protocols/standardized treatments aren't followed. You don't need AI to make that work, you need wider adoption of checklists with workflows that are efficient enough to continue to deliver care to the same amount of people while they're being implemented so that hospitals are willing to adopt them. The diseases that can be effectively caught with screening tests - colon cancer, cervical cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer in high risk patients, abdominal aortic aneurysms, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, depression, etc. - already have screening programs in place.
Every dollar spent coming up with the next automated imaging diagnosis model would be better spent on a model that encourages people to get up and exercise 5x/week, quit smoking (or never start), and get their colonoscopy. Once the patient is presenting to the doctor with heart failure, coronary artery disease, carotid stenosis, COPD, colon cancer, etc. the battle is already lost.
Complain all you want about the healthcare system holding data back. You don't need the healthcare system to make the biggest impact on people's health.
—- I’ll add that your shamanism comment sounds like the typical bs that the 20-something software engineer, who thinks they know everything because they make more than 100k a year and have never had to go to a doctor for anything other than strep throat or generalized anxiety disorder let alone spent anytime in a hospital other than to visit family members, that are everywhere on this site loves to say about physicians or other healthcare workers to shit on them.
> Person doesn't feel good, so the doctor orders a useless test, test comes back negative so the person feels better.
Person doesn't feel good. Mild flu-like symptoms. There's a good chance that the patient will get better if I do literally nothing. However, I also know that it could be X, Y, Z... So I order a test to prove that it's not those diseases because if it turns out to be them it would make me guilty of gross negligence.
Concrete example: symptoms of hypothyroidism are similar to depression, therefore you must rule out hypothyroidism in order to diagnose depression.
> 10 full blood panel samples a year
Why? Where's your evidence that this waste of money will benefit anyone? Even yearly screenings are sometimes questioned in medicine and they do have evidence backing them up showing reductions in mortality. What are you even trying to find?
Also, because we haven’t done this at scale, we don’t know the true baseline for most people who may have something on the blood panel samples but never get tested because they are asymptomatic. So then we have this whole group of people with recommended treatment because of the results, even though they are asymptomatic. And they are treated, which then leads to increased costs and side effects…
And now we’ve effectively increased medical costs and decreased quality of life for asymptomatic patients. BUT - if we do it with just a drop of blood, we might be able to start a startup and raise some funding… We could call it Thermos or something…
