| > greater human trust in computers and recommendation systems I am an MD and have a degree in CS. Expert systems are not remotely there yet for this purpose. On no planet would I trust care of my patients to a computer. Far too many subtleties involved in accurate diagnosis and treatment that are not encoded in a machine-readable format. > legal regime which mandates DOCTORS perform procedures, and only after a lengthy course of study Good reasons for this - it actually takes that lengthy course of study to safely perform many procedures, and, more importantly, to fix things when they go wrong. NPs and PAs are helpful but based on the quality of care that I personally observe they should not function without physician oversight. There is no escaping that medicine is an extremely complex field, and it is only getting more so. Not long ago, many of the people who today are restored to their usual state of health would simply have died. The sicker a patient is, the more complex and difficult to manage they are. By definition a doctor is the one who is able to do so. I am still waiting to meet a patient who comes to the hospital and prefers to have their care rendered by non-physician providers over physicians, or would even settle if there were an option. |
US medicine has been very successful at creating a guild system that's prevented lower-cost provision of care for decades, all under the concern of "it'll lower the standards of patient care." End result has been millions of people who can't afford medical care at all.
One anecdote: for a time I was splitting living in the UK and the US and had health care experiences in both places. It was fascinating to see the differences in treating my (very ordinary) health issues. One time I came down with a mild rash that rebounded a few times before it finally went away. In the UK, the GP looked at the rash, punctured the pustules with little pokey thing so they'd drain, and they cleared up in a few days. In the US, the dermatologist wheeled in a big machine filled with liquid nitrogen and froze the pustules; they went away in a few days after that too. End result the same; cost to administer - orders of magnitude different. In the US, it seems like there's no medical treatment that we can't make more expensive by requiring more specialists with more years of training, using ever more expensive machines and medications.
I love modern medicine. My dad's a retired doctor and I almost became an MD myself. But the system we've created has costs out of control while simultaneously creating worse societal health outcomes than other countries.