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Comment by chromatin | Hacker News Reader

It also helps to have a relationship with a patient (or person).

There are some people who will never, ever complain about anything. When they complain of severe abdominal pain, for example, you pull out all the stops immediately to figure out what's wrong, because it's probably really bad.

On the other hand, there are hypochondriacs and people will low pain tolerance. While they can certainly also become seriously ill -- and one must never forget this -- the tempo and pace of workup and order of intervention is markedly different, absent other information that shifts the pretest probabilities.

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Sometimes a relationship is bad. If you think someone’s a hypochondriac, but in fact they’re unusually sensitive, you’ll dismiss a lot of what they say and that can be quite damaging over time. (Especially if they’re female https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/women-and-pain-dispariti...).

I wouldn’t eliminate GPs from the process, but many people actually would like to hear what the robots have to say about their medical conditions. Having second opinions of this sort available might lead to better patient outcomes.

Lol. Maybe people who don’t have any medical problems.

There isn’t enough humanity in healthcare to begin with. Replacement of doctors with AI sounds pretty horrific. General practice isn’t where healthcare costs are going bonkers, and it seems weird to want to cost-cut something that actually kind of works in favor of bullshit.

Know what would be a great use of AI? Something real like analyzing all of the telemetry in EMRs to provide better guidance to doctors to proactively guide people. Some CVSHealth chatbot telling me whatever is a waste of time.

I think the person was suggesting using the results of the AI to inform the doctors, not replacing them. Which is something I would like as well

Automated diagnosis applications have existed for decades. They have proven useful in limited circumstances for certain specialties and rare conditions but for routine medical care they're more hassle than they're worth.

There is no evidence that diagnostic robots would actually produce better outcomes. The hypochondriacs are already able to Google their symptoms and make themselves sick with anxiety.

> On the other hand, there are hypochondriacs

That’s me. I really, really appreciate a GP that both understands that I’m not doing it on purpose, and can reassure me that nothing is wrong, or figure out that we actually do need more testing this time.

Unfortunately it’s been years since I had one like that :/

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