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...
Journey of children’s life from infancy to adulthood is marked by many milestones. The years pass by and they begin to spread their wings to fly leaving behind them a few memories. As I dusted the old “Scrabble” I remembered my younger son saying “It is not interesting to play scrabble with you any more”. “Why” I queried his reply was pert “because you play to lose”. It is always very difficult to keep the children involved during summer vacations when you want them to be engaged, creative, constructive and disciplined; managing all these fronts is where you need to show your talent in. This is where the scrabble fitted in very well for me. Day after day for hours and for years we played scrabble. Initially I would be the mentor to both of them. I sometimes made exceptions to continue the game taught them to make words so that it would not come to a dead end. Being older I was the inevitable winner and I always managed to hide my excitement about my winning status. It was a logical con...