Thank you Bruce Lanphear, Clyde Wilson, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, Diego Pereyra, Dr Mike Hunter, and many others for tuning into my live video with Charlotte Blease! Join me for my next live video in the app.Whether A.I. will transform the practice of medicine in a positive way remains controversial. Health researcher Prof Charlotte Blease, on faculty at Uppsala University in Sweden and researcher at Harvard University, has written a new book —Dr. Bot—that critically assesses the unmet needs in healthcare and whether A.I. can fulfill them. She provides an optimistic viewpoint (see the subtitle), and our conversation probes whether that is justified. She has a substack, too, hereThanks for listening to Ground Truths. Through analytic essays and podcasts, I try to cover the important issues and discoveries in life science and medicine. If you have suggestions for topics I should get into, please pass them along. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Now, this is very provocative, Charlotte. And to start off, there's a lot of common ground that we've covered in like my book, Deep Medicine, and your new book. And we're also at a time when AI is getting lots of grief, lots of pushback, blowback, everything. And now you've come out with a book that, you know, this sounds like AI is their cure.
So let's start off, if you would, you come up with a really, some great vignettes of patient experience. And one is Jen Lawson. a young woman with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Why don't you take us through that to kind of exemplify where the problems are in medicine today?
Yeah, and I would say, Eric, I don't want to fall into this kind of false dichotomy of either or camps here. I mean, the book is a very provocative title in some sense, but basically what I'm trying to do is say what are the problems with current medicine traditional medicine to which AI could potentially be a solution or might not, thinking about the status of current AI.
But yeah, Jen Lawson is a patient with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome who, through a series of problems with her health, loses her medical insurance. She has a very serious fall. She loses her health coverage and basically eats into her pension fund. in order to cover her health costs. And as we know, that's not a very uncommon story.
So what I do is I open it up with her to discuss not only the financial barriers to care, which sometimes even get hidden when it comes to thinking about universal healthcare, healthcare free at the point of access, so to speak, is going to be a solution to some of medicine's woes. It will be for some patients.
But what I'm trying to say is there are multiple barriers, even given the fact that, say, she's able to get access to care because she has to rely on her elderly mother to drive her across state to see a specialist at one point.
it's very uncomfortable she has to pay out of pocket in order to do that because realistically she can't rely on the on the the budget uh options that would be covered and she's basically got a whole series of obstacles that prevent her from having comfortable access to care and then i say you know with telemedicine some of the challenges were eradicated and um
she was able comfortably to access some doctors, you know, with pillows behind her and all the rest of her, where she can sit comfortably. But Jen suffers from sort of, not just sort of the literal barriers to care, but figurative barriers too. She discusses some of the biases that do kick in that make it more difficult to see patients with extra needs and to make them comfortable
And I use that as a vehicle and as a way to discuss the challenges for doctors and nurses and other people to multitask and to do things to make. But ultimately, she exemplifies, to cut a long story short, the inverse care law. That is, for the people most in need, there are more barriers to getting access to bricks and mortar health care.
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