I worked with a research oriented M.D. in the 90s, he had a friend die suddenly in his mid-60s and he made a project of figuring out what really happened to his friend. He was adept at PubMed searches, etc. and worked the problem for 6 weeks, about 4 weeks in he had a solid case for the misdiagnosis that led to the maltreatment that made his friend first worse, then within 72 hours dead. Still, he didn’t find any basis for malpractice (you can always file a lawsuit even with less than zero basis, but that wasn’t his purpose.)
At the end of it, he was left wondering what the solution is, because no one person can carry sufficient knowledge to make accurate diagnosis in all cases all the time, to make the right referrals even. He died in 2020, I bet the LLM agents (AI) of the past year are what he was searching for 30 years ago - it will take time for adoption and trust, but in the end I think we’re going to get better benefit of all that knowledge captured (currently all but buried) in the research publications. As long as power players like big pharma don’t turn the whole thing into a pill referral system - they way they corrupted my last GP’s practice. Any conversation with that M.D. (who gets regular office visits from drug reps with samples and free lunch for everyone) turns into “there’s a pill for that…” I’ve since moved to a D.O. - he’s much less inclined to treat every hint of a complaint with an Rx.
I worked with a research oriented M.D. in the 90s, he had a friend die suddenly in his mid-60s and he made a project of figuring out what really happened to his friend. He was adept at PubMed searches, etc. and worked the problem for 6 weeks, about 4 weeks in he had a solid case for the misdiagnosis that led to the maltreatment that made his friend first worse, then within 72 hours dead. Still, he didn’t find any basis for malpractice (you can always file a lawsuit even with less than zero basis, but that wasn’t his purpose.)
At the end of it, he was left wondering what the solution is, because no one person can carry sufficient knowledge to make accurate diagnosis in all cases all the time, to make the right referrals even. He died in 2020, I bet the LLM agents (AI) of the past year are what he was searching for 30 years ago - it will take time for adoption and trust, but in the end I think we’re going to get better benefit of all that knowledge captured (currently all but buried) in the research publications. As long as power players like big pharma don’t turn the whole thing into a pill referral system - they way they corrupted my last GP’s practice. Any conversation with that M.D. (who gets regular office visits from drug reps with samples and free lunch for everyone) turns into “there’s a pill for that…” I’ve since moved to a D.O. - he’s much less inclined to treat every hint of a complaint with an Rx.