AI is the future of medicine - studies show almost half of doctors can't cope with their workloads and most of what they learnt at medical school is out of date by the time they graduate

What is the future of health care? Will it have a human face? Or will we all be making appointments to see what Blease calls Dr. Bot, an AI-powered physician.

Modern medicine is, as she writes, ‘one of humankind’s most impressive accomplishments’ but change is needed.

Health services around the world are creaking under the pressure of increasing numbers of patients, many elderly and suffering from chronic conditions. Blease, a health researcher for nearly 20 years, has witnessed this in the US and Europe.

As she points out, we often expect doctors to be like ‘demigods’ but they are feeling the strain. A recent study in the UK revealed that 42 per cent believed they were unable to cope with their workload.

One problem is keeping up with swiftly evolving knowledge. ‘By the time medical students graduate,’ Blease writes, ‘around 50 per cent of what they’ve learned is out of date.’

Research burgeons at an astonishing rate. ‘Across the whole of medicine, a new article is published every 39 seconds.’ No human can keep up with it.

AI, by contrast, can ingest medical publication and new data in seconds and can do so without breaking for meals, sleep or leading a life outside work.

Critics often claim that no machine could ever match a good human doctor’s bedside manner. ‘A lot of my job is about genuine interpersonal interaction and empathy’, says one British GP, ‘and I cannot see how AI will achieve this.’

Yet in 2024, Google unveiled a chatbot called AMIE (Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer). In tests where they interacted with either doctor or bot, without knowing which, patients judged AMIE better than the humans on 24 out of 26 measures.

These included politeness, trustworthiness and listening to descriptions of symptoms.

Other studies show that patients may be more open with bots than with humans when discussing potentially embarrassing subjects such as sexual diseases, alcohol and drugs.

AI could also help diagnose serious illnesses before major symptoms appear. ChatGPT, for example, can detect early signs of dementia by analysing subtle speech patterns.

The reality is that AI will prove a boon to patients in the future but it must be, in Blease’s words, ‘thoughtfully implemented’. It may well be a slow process in the UK. In 2023, there were reportedly 600 archaic fax machines still in operation across the NHS.

However, the change is inevitable and, as Blease’s thought-provoking book shows, necessary. Nor is it to be feared.

An American emergency medicine doctor neatly summarises the situation. ‘AI will never replace a competent physician,’ he notes.

Nonetheless, there is ‘little doubt that a competent physician who uses the tools that AI has to offer will soon replace the physician who ignores these tools’.