{"id":774895,"date":"2026-05-05T12:37:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T12:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/774895\/"},"modified":"2026-05-05T12:37:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T12:37:12","slug":"opinion-why-a-i-will-never-replace-your-doctor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/774895\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | Why A.I. Will Never Replace Your Doctor"},"content":{"rendered":"

As soon as I spotted my patient in the waiting room, I knew that I\u2019d be admitting him to the hospital. His breathing wasn\u2019t necessarily heavy, but there was something in the contour of his respirations that caught my eye. Or maybe it was the expression on his face \u2014 eyes more quizzical than crinkling, lips more decisively hewn than usual.<\/p>\n

Every doctor and nurse has had this experience \u2014 a glance at a patient and the instant recognition that something has run amok in his or her physiology. This is especially common in primary care medicine, where we know our patients for years, sometimes decades. We know their gait, their heart murmurs, their blood counts. And we know when something is amiss.<\/p>\n

Like most doctors these days, I\u2019ve been incorporating medical artificial intelligence tools into my practice. It\u2019s become so easy to type in a quick description of an 86-year-old male with heart failure, diabetes and gout \u2014 toss in some test results, and see what the bot spits out. I appreciate that A.I. can expeditiously outline next steps for the clinical evaluation, or provide suggestions for rarer diagnoses or spit out a feisty appeal letter for an insurance denial. But the problem is that A.I. is evaluating only some statistical average of 86-year-old males with heart failure, diabetes and gout. It is not assessing that one specific 86-year-old man with these conditions whom I am looking at across the waiting room.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an ocean of distance between the \u201cpatient\u201d that A.I. is analyzing and the patient that the human doctor or nurse is assessing. Navigating the gap is something writers also grapple with. When making a diagnosis, as it were, of good writing to publish in the literary journal I edit, I look for characters that are fully realized, with physicality that is palpable and an emotional complexity both visceral and vivid. These details aren\u2019t always made explicit, but pieced together in hints and subtle cues. What I\u2019ve realized over the years is this is not so different from what a doctor has to do when assessing her patient\u2019s health.<\/p>\n

This is the inherent limitation of A.I. in medicine. It\u2019s simply impossible \u2014 at least for now \u2014 for these tools to truly see the multidimensional patient. A.I. can\u2019t know how the agony of a child estranged by substance use affects the blood pressure. It can\u2019t factor in the economic and social crosscurrents that bear on medication adherence. It can\u2019t account for the simmering grief of a lost spouse that influences a patient\u2019s health decisions far more than any clinical guideline.<\/p>\n

So while A.I. is a useful tool, particularly for pattern recognition and data organization, the \u201cpatients\u201d it manages feel like stock characters who share check-box traits with actual patients in the same way a Harlequin romance heroine shares the same number of limbs as Anna Karenina. A.I. might be quick to spit out a treatment plan, and it might even be correct, but a clinician must decide how to make that treatment work for the specific person sitting in front of her, or whether to even treat at all. Such decisions do not readily follow an algorithm.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to be book smart \u2014 our A.I. tools and databases may already have a monopoly on information processing \u2014 but it\u2019s far harder to be wise and know how to apply the trove of knowledge at our disposal. As we train the next generation of doctors and nurses, we can worry a bit less about the smarts (they\u2019re all smart enough, and they can look up whatever they need to know), but we have to help them cultivate the wisdom of what to do with all those facts, and how to guide individual patients through their very particular maelstroms of illness.<\/p>\n

Understanding complexity of character is why medical humanities are arguably as important as A.I. skills for these rising clinicians. A.I. is optimized to provide us a seemingly certain answer, but clinical medicine is anything but certain. Grappling with ambiguity, uncertainty and contradiction is exactly where the humanities excel, and exactly why A.I. can\u2019t supplant the totality of medical care.<\/p>\n

I admitted my patient to the hospital for his heart failure, but it turned out that his kidney function had significantly worsened, both likely precipitated by a wrenching family crisis that upended his eating habits. A.I. might have been able to offer a template for treating his heart failure and even suggest that dialysis was indicated, but it would have faltered in advising whether dialysis would improve or worsen the quality of life for this particular 86-year-old. And it would have been useless for navigating the family crisis that mattered far more in my patient\u2019s life than either of his flagging kidneys.<\/p>\n

A.I. can be a useful prop in the patient\u2019s story, but the character study remains an indispensable part of accurate diagnosis and effective treatment. The moment a patient\u2019s illness unfolds before us, after all, we doctors and nurses become characters in that story. For my patient, our joint story has gone on for almost 25 years \u2014 a miracle, frankly, in a rapacious health care system that is heroically unconducive to primary care. I\u2019m glad to have A.I. as a tool, but I\u2019m even more grateful to hear my patient\u2019s faithful heartbeat, every single time I lay my stethoscope on his chest.<\/p>\n

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  1. \"\"\/\n

    Danielle Ofri<\/p>\n

    Opinion guest essayist<\/p>\n

    Writing about this topic made me think about when (and how) I use technology in medicine versus when I rely on my human skills. If you are a healthcare professional, I\u2019d love to hear examples of how human observation or intuition clinched a medical encounter. Patients, I\u2019d be interested to hear how you experience both technology and human skills when you are on the business end of the stethoscope.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Read all comments<\/a><\/p>\n

    Danielle Ofri, a primary care doctor at Bellevue Hospital, is the author of \u201cWhen We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error\u201d and the editor in chief of Bellevue Literary Review.<\/p>\n

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