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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

For sure. A friend of mine went to med school and chose the general practitioner path. One time I was hanging out at their place, so I leafed through some of the GP journals on the coffee table. It seemed much more akin to car repair than to science.

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yeah, I was just thinking about this today. Doctors seem less like engineers and more like QA testers or PMs trying to fix bugs since there's nobody better suited to the job available.

Hopefully medical science will keep advancing rapidly here..

I doubt doctors will get better at this in our lifetimes. As we discover ever more about the human body, how are doctors expected to keep up with the research on top of everything else?

I’m hoping AI systems can help. A good medical AI should be able to stay abreast of all the research, know your personal medical history and suggest and evaluate any and all medical tests that are needed. Doctors will hate it, but I expect AIs will give much more accurate diagnoses than humans before long.

Just some statistics can help. My family doctor has some kind of awful green screen practice software but amazingly it has prognosis statistics for certain lab diagnostic results. Makes for better discussion about treatment plans.

I agree. Doctors' performance will remain the same as it has for thousands of years: overall, not so good. But, they've been using AI systems for well near a decade, especially in triage and real-time transcriptions. I haven't met many that don't love AI already in their day to day work.

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