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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

Why I have the eerie feeling that this sort of thing might be very dangerous?

I mean, what happen if too much people start to rely only on this, and then it is used to mislead (WWII battle of beams style) or what happen if people start to become dependant on it, and you have a power failure?

For example a massive solar storm might happen in our lifetime, the last time it happened (about 150 years ago) it made telegraph lines catch on fire, and people could read newspaper at night using the aurora in the middle of the caribbean. If that happen again, it is very likely that we will have some time of global power and communication loss. Of course, that will mean some chaos. How hospitals that rely too much on technology will treat take care of the emergency?

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In your scenario there will be so many other major problems that slower healthcare diagnoses will not be much of a factor. Most medical equipment would also be unusable so even if you know what is wrong you would be unable to do anything about it.

You could make the same case against Google and yet it has proven to be a huge boon.

This product is essentially a search engine. Doctors refer to medical texts all of time, this IBM tool is simply making it easier (and faster) to access the right information using plain English queries. It's not like we're going to replace doctors with computer kiosks...well, at least not until they work out some of the bugs.

It's more than a search engine it aggregates the information from say 10 different studies or cases about a disease into a set of information which it then compares against the current case the doctor is looking at. At that point it posits some diagnoses or some treatments.

Calling it a search engine is pretty dismissive.

I'm wasn't being dismissive. I'm not suggesting what IBM has accomplished is trivial... what I'm saying is, doctors can't use Watson to do their job; it's just another diagnostic resource... As opposed to being a harbinger of the coming robopocalyse (as some people seem to be suggesting)

I agree, this is a lot more than a search engine. But I guess that over time it will have to deal with the same issues that search engines do.

Think drug company or test procedure journal spam, designed to SEO Watson into making specific decisions or recommendations.

Ideally if Watson were able to parse documents well enough they would have to actively lie in order to twist Watson that way. Also a lot of what goes into Watson is peer reviewed in the medical field iirc so there's also that buffer.

Have you used Google recently?

For all the grand magic that Google works behind the scenes it falls pretty short of the work that Watson does.

Our doctors certainly already do.

Blindly trusting your doctor is dangerous, yet most people do.

I suppose very few doctors have way less than 90% accuracy and, on top of that, Watson is not sensitive to external factors. This is a fantastic tool and may end up changing the way we interface with the health care system.

As a doctor I agree.

At medical school you learn to develop algorithms to deal with inputs and act upon the output.

Out of medical school you are meant to keep up to date with countless updates in clinical practice based on mountains of studies and publications. Plenty of data is not distributed.

This is a great step forward for medicine.

> I suppose very few doctors have way less than 90% accuracy

It's a reasonable thought. When this has been studied at autopsy, however, doctors seem to be right 70-85% of the time (higher when very confident of the diagnosis) [1]. There are a bunch of studies that show this, and you can find many in the linked meta-analysis.

Of course, this focuses on things that can lead to death. If your doctor misdiagnosis RSV as metapneumovirus, you'll survive either way in all likelihood, so for some diseases we'll probably never know the true diagnostic accuracy.

[1] = http://www.pathkids.com/autopsy/hasleton%20on%20discrepancie...

another secret in medicine is that a lot of what patients come in for end up to be self-limiting anyhow; the patients just gets better on their own. in these cases, there may be misdiagnosis in there somewhere, but nobody would really care.

In general practice, you will find that doctors become less accurate as they get older; whereas in surgery, older doctors generally perform better with less complications. The reason is that the feedback loop in surgery is instant -- you do something wrong, you have to fix immediately -- wheas in general practice, it is often the case that the doctor never even knows of the prescribed treatment worked so the feedback is a lot "weaker". Therefore, I think Watson could be hugely beneficial and counter-balance the biases and decline in skills that plagues many doctors who work in general practice.

I know at least a few doctors (and one surgeon) who know they weren't in optimal condition at times because of personal issues. It's only human, but it's horrible if things go wrong because of that.

Well...

I don't.

And then other people get mad at me for that, I am kinda tired that every time I argue with a doctor (or that people find out that I did that), there are a argument about how I am not a student of medicine or a doctor and should not argue with them.

So there is kind a social pressure toward that.

But I still don't trust them anyway (because I have my symptoms, there are good research on the subject, and every time a doctor did what I nagged him to do, it worked, but they are too conservative to believe in the research until whatever council they obey tell them to do so, and some even that way still refuse to change)

Find better doctors. My doctors never argue from authority, and are willing to challenge some "research"

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