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...
The talk of Time Machine and Theory of Relativity is for the likes of Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. As far as I am concerned, I only look back in my photographic albums to travel back rather than forward. As I conveyed my anniversary greetings to my cousin today, I reflected on nearly two decades ago. My children got very excited to travel by train for her wedding. The moment they boarded the train and reached the compartment just near the door, all hell broke loose. They discovered that the compartment had just three berths and even a sliding door, so it turned out they had a room to themselves with bunk beds, and to top it all, the room was chilled. The baby boys imitated the monkeys as they sprang from berth to berth, laughing and playing all games. Soon, the journey was over, and the sultry weather in Delhi drained them. The return journey by Shatabdi was equally memorable for them. The Meals on Wheels was just beyond their baby minds. The juices,...