John Reisman

speaker

51 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

John Reisman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

3 Takeaways™ · I’m a Doctor. ChatGPT’s Bedside Manner Is Better Than Mine. (#223) · 12 Nov 2024 podcast

One of the lines that I learned, one of the scripts was the I wish line. I wish I had better news. That kind of does make it more personal. And having those lines, I almost think about it like you have a tool belt with different tools you can pull out, different lines you can pull out in different instances. And, you know, it sounds robotic.

It sounds technical when you should be utterly human in that situation, yet you're pulling out these prescripted lines, but they really do help in those situations.

I did find that having that script, having those tools, those lines really, really helps. It's such a surreal situation. You know, I would have thought I did think as a medical student, these situations are you just one human to another. You're just having a heart to heart conversation and while at the same time conveying some technical information about the diagnosis and prognosis.

But it is a very unnatural setting. So as an ER doctor, I often find cancer, let's say, on a CAT scan when I'm working up a patient's symptoms. This is a person I've never met before. They've never met me. I'm playing a role that I play every day to make a living. For me, this happens semi-often. And for them, it could be the worst day of their life.

So there's this huge chasm between us, this stranger I've never met before and likely will never meet again. It's not surprising that a human... might act unnaturally in such a situation.

You know, we're all in our jobs acting out this unnatural role, playing a role, really, no matter what our job is, and that the same goes for doctors and even in those most human moments when you are telling a patient some life-changing information.

So in retrospect, it's not surprising that these sort of lines, these pre-written scripts help in that situation to sort of bridge that emotional, professional chasm from which both of me and the patient are coming at this very difficult conversation.

Scripts are everywhere. When you think about it for a second, you think, oh, we're just humans. And when we talk, it's human to human interactions. But our society and our lives are pervaded with scripts. When we greet people, we're following a script. And when we say goodbye, there's scripts between husbands and wives. There's scripts between friends.

There's scripts between professional colleagues. There's things you don't say in certain contexts and that you do say in others contexts. whatever your job is, if you're in politics, if you're in the medical setting, you know, there's things you say and there's things you don't say in those contexts. So we're kind of all following all these scripts.

And, you know, it seemed repulsive to me at first to think, oh, there's this pre-written script and I'm just an actor on a stage following stage directions when I should be a human in the moment connecting with this other human. But pre-written scripts, pre-written actions and choreographed motions and gestures pervades every aspect of society.

And I think when I thought about it, I realized it's actually a big part of being a human is a script. And you're not just improvising and freewheeling it all day long every day. We're all kind of following roles to some extent, though we may improvise on the script. Obviously, I'm not reciting the same words. exact words to every patient. It is a conversation. There is a back and forth.

So it's sort of like you have the script, but then you sort of improvise on it to fit it to the specific context or the specific conversation that you're having. And that's kind of like how human life works in society, I think.

I think we will. I think there's no other way. I think so many areas of life have reduced human to human interaction. You know, I sometimes use chat bots online to get certain banking tasks accomplished. And I think most of health care can go that same way. You know, doctors are expensive. Maintaining facilities are very expensive.

Health care is a huge proportion of our national costs for the country. And so reducing those costs will be great. Hopefully, in some ways, we'll increase access, decrease the cost. But as a side effect, there'll be less human interaction. There'll be more interaction with machines, with AIs. So it's kind of a brave new world we're entering.

And hopefully, we can find the right balance without losing our humanity, even though we're interacting less and less with other humans.

Certainly AI can be very helpful even without feeling any compassion itself. I don't think any of us strive for a world where all human compassion and emotion is driven out and only technical verbal scripts of compassion remain.

Surely humans caring for each other, a doctor caring for their patient, a doctor feeling terrible about what they've just discovered on a CAT scan inside a patient's abdomen or skull. Surely that compassion must stay in the world and we must maintain it. And AI, you know, if you're just writing a form letter to a patient about some ho-hum test result, that's not that serious.

I don't think tremendous compassion is needed. But certainly some is needed in these more human moments. And I think it will take some adaptation. And I wonder how far... Humans can take it. You know, traditionally, we talk to each other face to face.

We hear each other's voice, which turned into the written word where you can send a letter across the country and you're not looking at the patient, which turned into sort of like a telecommunications where we see each other, but we're across some distant geographic chasm. So the way we communicate with each other has changed so much. So I wonder how much AI communication we can tolerate.

Maybe patients won't actually miss their human doctors all that much. Most diagnoses I deliver are not life changing. they're pretty ho-hum. They are, oh, you sprained your ankle, you didn't break it, or you broke it and didn't sprain and you're going to follow up with an orthopedist, or you have strep throat, or you don't have strep throat, you have a viral cause of your sore throat.

Showing 21–40 of 51 · page 2 of 3