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TW's avatar

Thank you for eloquently speaking what I was thinking! Even with alt med, you still need to be able to accurately notice the symptoms that help in a diagnosis- if you miss the feel of the skin or the smell of the breath because you didnt know that's a clue, how do you input that info into the AI? Some things aren't quantifiable, and that's going to be a problem for a computer.

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ForestDi56's avatar

Precisely. Not to mention all the other cues one picks up by just listening to a patient’s story, asking a few questions after, and listening some more. I can’t tell you how many times I found the problem embedded in the story that went back many years prior to the outbreak of the diseased state.

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The Great Santini's avatar

A different version of the same principle. I remember being a new Lieutenant in the Army. My Company Commander seemed to have an uncanny sense of the one place in my Platoon that was completely fouled up, even though I had tried to hide it. It was an amazing 6th sense. Five years later I was the Company Commander doing the same exact thing to my Lieutenants. Experienced human intuition is an amazing thing. Your subconscious knows and sees more than you can. The more complex the subject the more intuition plays a part. And medicine is very complex.

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Bgagnon's avatar

Excellent example of “the human factor.” 👏🏻

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JBell's avatar

Right .... like my grandmother could "smell" a fever or an ear infection.

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AM Schimberg's avatar

But how many doctors now function like that?

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Aletheia Charis's avatar

Very few

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