I am a big believer in AI for drug discovery. But AI applied to patient care will never be used to benefit the patient or increase quality of care.
Cost reductions will be absorbed for profits. The medical industry has already aggressively implemented AI automation (imaging, automated note taking, etc) and in that period, costs have only increased.
My hour long yearly physical takes 15 minutes and my miscellaneous questions get brushed off. I have some sort of eczema on my hand and he told me to use lotion. After telling him I do, he said to keep doing it. It had been six months then and now 18 months. Problem is still there.
Just today I finally found a dermatologist. Soonest appointment I could get from the ones I called is May of 2027.
At a certain point, I hope LLMs can provide at least basic medical help reliably because I can't get the opportunity to ask a doctor to begin with.
That being said, have you tried more than just basic lotion? Butenafine clears a lot of fungal issues. High content zinc oxide diaper paste is also very useful. There's a brand from Dollar Tree that's very popular but triple paste is another option. The heavy zinc oxide coating cures a wide array of skin issues.
Wash your hands with nizoral then moisturizer with something like Okeefes or just the ZO cream.
https://apnews.com/article/telehealth-prescription-glp1-ftc-...
https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/12/13/out-of-control-d...
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/your-health-data-being-sold-wit...
Do you get small blisters on your hands and maybe feet? If so, it's called dyshydrotic eczema.
I was told for years that it was an autoimmune disorder, had tons of different treatments and specialists, only to discover it was an allergy to milk protein. I can't have any mammal milk product, no butter, cheese, etc... but I'm completely cured.
As part of this journey I also found out that a lot of women develop it as a result of nickel allergy and Low Nickel Diet helps.
Sorry to go off the rails, I just wanted to take the chance that I could help someone avoid everything I went through.
So here, AI isn't doing anything clever, it's just asking "are you sure you don't have a heart condition" and "are you sure you're not a crazy person". We don't really need LLMs for that, but if it's a catalyst for liberalization, fine.
So are we just admitting that the "AI" here is the equivalent of a dialog box and this same change could have been enacted at any point in the last half century?
>We don't really need LLMs for that, but if it's a catalyst for liberalization, fine.
Is this liberalization or is it just further entrenching the bureaucracy that this change implies is already broken?
This whole thing just feels like a Chesterton's fence scenario in which we knock down the fence and then immediately rebuild it, only a few inches shorter and with weaker materials this time. I just don't see how that's any sort of victory for progress.
And the medications that are controlled vs uncontrolled (at least here in Texas) seem completely random.
It sounds like a catalyst for more red tape, more creepy Internet tracking, higher drug costs and more impossible to break subscriptions, all to help some health care companies' bottom lines. I don't consider this fine.
> Only topical acne medications from a restricted list: tretinoin, adapalene, clindamycin with benzoyl peroxide, benzoyl peroxide, and azelaic acid, some combined with niacinamide or topical spironolactone. Each plan includes a morning and an evening treatment. The pilot does not include oral or systemic medications, hormonal therapies, or isotretinoin.
So it's a short list of topical creams. Several of them are already available over the counter. Benzoyl peroxide creams are on the shelf of your nearest grocery store. Some of them are available in higher strengths via prescription only and should be reserved for only severe or refractory cases after escalation. A lot of people go straight for the highest strength they can find on the shelf, so having a prescription gate for the stronger stuff can be justified.
Others on the list like tretinoin are currently prescription only. That one is a strong chemical that will burn your skin if you don't read the instructions about to apply and also makes you prone to sunburn. A lot of people don't read the instructions, they just apply the cream and see what happens. Having a provider, even if it's AI, do something to force them to understand the risks can be arguably justified. Tretinoin is also a risk to fetal development, so having a provider ask if female patients are on birth control is important. That said it is OTC in some other countries, so there's an argument that it should be OTC here as well.
The AI doctor is not allowed to prescribe anything really serious. It's a combination of prescription versions of OTC creams and a few topicals that benefit from some light provider instructions. Having a $5 option to get them with the serious cases shunted to actual doctors is not a bad tradeoff.
And doctors aren't infallible, AI (and rule based systems) can act as an extra safeguard for them as long as they don't blindly trust it.
Drugged with a topical ointment and complacent by having less acne? This is a one-year trial for patients with mild-to-moderate acne. Let's not blow this situation out of proportion. This trial seems rather narrowly scoped and overall a positive idea for well understood treatments that hardly need an MD to begin with.
If you want to get into conspiracy theories of a government wanting a drugged and compliant citizenry just look no further than the sudden push legalizing THC across the country.
I see this same fallacy repeated all the time when we speak about AI.
"I want AI to be 100% accurate and not 99.999%"
"If AI makes even one mistake, why would I even use it?"
"What's the point of using AI if I have to verify it anyway?"
Here's how it could work.
You could always have a CI sort of thing for doctors prescriptions where you run the prescription through AI and it can flag any potential error to the doctor.
The LLM can be accurate enough that it only flags things when necessary
You could always have a CI sort of thing for doctors prescriptions where you run the prescription through AI and it can flag any potential error to the doctor.
"Lets not write unit tests. We can hire developers to write good code that doesn't break"
> What positive value does the AI actually add that isn't circumventing a legal requirement that we decided to put in place?
You only reply with stuff nobody said. Which explains why you "see those fallacies repeated" every time, if you bring them up. A simple solution is to stick things actually are saying.
> If we believe the doctor's oversight is required, the AI introduces a dangerous potential for error
This assumes that the doctor won't verify what the AI said. This is a fallacy.
> The final phase will involve a doctor reviewing at least 10% of the total prescriptions issued once a month.