[christina97]

GP is saying that the goal should be something entirely different from gathering lots of data.

Do you think the average person wants a higher resolution time series of their weight, or better access to a higher quality doctor, cheaper?

[moduspol]

I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have. And all doctors would be able to make better decisions.

[jmye]

> I think in a more sane universe, we'd be 50-100 years further along into medicine today just by gathering and analyzing more data with the technology we already have.

What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd.

Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?

[moregrist]

Claiming “50-100 years” is a misleading and hand-waving way of saying “futuristic.”

It tries to get you to imagine that advances in the last 50-100 years will project linearly into advances in the next 50-100 years.

This is not generally the way that science and medicine work. Even if you add in gobs of questionable data collected by companies with a bad track record of doing right by it.

They’re essentially trying to get you to believe that AI + your data will give you the kind of step change in medicine that we got from penicillin and X-rays/MRI/CT imaging. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick.

[moduspol]

> What on earth do you think that load of garble means? "50-100 years further along" is absurd.

It seems straightforward. Imagine where medical care was 50-100 years ago, and then imagine they had all the data, resources, and practices we have today. In that case, they would have been 50-100 years further ahead than they were.

> Why do you think "more data" is necessarily meaningful, in a health context?

I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it. That does not imply that all data is equally worth collecting.

[aerodexis]

> I think the only way to find out what data is meaningful is to collect and analyze more of it

So the idea is to just muck around with data, then ???, then make people healthier? To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail I suppose.

I don't work in healthcare, but it seems to me that the main problems in the field are:

1) a focus on addressing symptoms, not causes 2) pathologization of normal processes 3) normalization of pathological processes 4) financialization of care + doctor evaluations 5) regulatory capture by care providers

1, 2 and 3 are inherently philosophical problems, and there's no amount of data that you can toss at these problems to solve them. Thinking that data can solve these problems is itself part of the problem.

All I want is an AI that can take in basic information about my demographics, lifestyle, family history, religious beliefs, symptoms and vital signs - and then provide me information on tests I should run and drugs I should take - and then most importantly : tell me how to obtain those tests and drugs without ever dealing with some doctor who's 200k in debt from medical school and needs to appease their administrator by recommending x-many surgical procedures a quarter.

The incentives are bad - not the data or lack thereof.

[forshaper]

In a more sane universe, we'd have been further along simply standardizing & centralizing patient records for providers, figuring out base rates, and communicating those base rates to providers.

[andai]

The synthetic doctor is raised on megabytes.

(They need to be high quality megabytes, of course!)