3 Medical Routines That Older People May Not Need
A useful reminder that good medicine is not always more medicine. The article looks at three familiar routines—treating actinic keratoses, continuing levothyroxine in some older adults with subclinical hypothyroidism, and repeating colonoscopies after age 75—and asks a question physicians are asking more and more: What are we actually accomplishing here? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, some patients will still need treatment or medication, so many need surveillance. But as risks, life expectancy, discomfort, and burden begin to change the calculus, the work becomes more thoughtful and less about only following a familiar protocol. (from nytimes.com)
AI Is Taking Over Hospitals
This piece does a great job at capturing the strange, uneasy moment medicine has entered with AI. It’s here, embedding into hospitals, inboxes, clinical tools, healthcare apps, and medical decision-making faster than evidence or regulation can quite keep up. In diagnostic exercises, AI has shown real promise, particularly with rare diseases and unusual symptom patterns. But medicine is not some obstacle course, and a tool that can outperform physicians in one setting can still mislead them in another, draft absurd messages to patients, blur the line between education and medical advice, and enter clinical workflows without the kind of scrutiny we expect from almost everything else in health care. A reminder to exert useful caution against the concept of AI inevitability—the idea that because something is already being used, it must already be ready. (from theatlantic.com)
Has Tech Robbed Us of Our Sensory Lives?
This essay explores how the very tactile nature of life and work (something that medicine and surgery will always hold in some way) is disappearing around us. Touch, sound, texture, posture, collaboration, routine and ritual, the weight of a tool, muscle memory. Kyle Chayka writes about Ian Bogost’s The Small Stuff and the losses that come with a life increasingly mediated through screens. That flattened feel of doing everything through the same glass rectangle. The desire to watch videos of crafts, trades, and home repairs—people using their hands well. Efficiency is not the same as experience, and that some forms of knowledge still come through the hand before anything else. (from newyorker.com)
Related:
- State of the Union: The Stealth Innovations of Modern Surgical Care
- Dr AI: Can ChatGPT Step Up To the Medical Challenge?
- Using AI for Early Detection of Pancreatic Cancer? Five Questions with Dr. John Chabot