HEALTHCARE · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE · PATIENT EXPERIENCE Years ago, at a government hospital, I heard a surgeon say about a patient who kept asking him, "She must be a teacher." He was half-joking. She turned out to be one. It became my private joke: anyone who asks that many questions must be a teacher. I didn't know I'd think of that remark again. I think of it now because the patient who asks too many questions is no longer rare. She is in my family. Perhaps you have encountered her, too. A new kind of conversation My mother, my uncles, and my aunts are not medical professionals. When an unfamiliar symptom appears, they don't know the terminology, the likely causes, or the right questions to ask. But they have found ChatGPT and Gemini, and they talk to them like buddies. A symptom prompts a question, an answer prompts another, and nobody waits. Voice input matters most. They don't have to type a carefully worded query or know the medical term. They speak...
I was no wizard, still scared of Mathematics as I was before in my schooldays. Maths included arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. I was good in algebra and geometry, but arithmetic failed me at every step. Multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction scared me then and continue to do the same even today. Careless mistakes were a rule the more I tried the more disastrous were the results. This vicious cycle ended only when I opted for biology in class twelve. Math is an integral part of life, this realisation helped me lay stronger foundations for my children. My progeny inheriting my math gene was a scary thought. I slipped everywhere in life in all the calculations, but I never wished this for my children so, I decided to give them a head start. A mathematical mind which I craved even for myself. The early remembrances of mathematical marvels were my maternal grandmother and her sister who could do oral calculations of the grocery bought by their staff and the transactional di...