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...
Why? Do you do that early in the morning, leaving me at the mercy of the notorious invaders? I said, slapping the mosquitoes that charged through the open doors and windows. I want you to see the early morning skies and natural light and feel the fresh air. It is so beautiful outside in the garden. Many good things are for free. Enjoy them as they are, quipped my mom. Yes, I nodded in agreement. Everything is so expensive these days. This tectonic shift in inflation made me yearn for all I could get for peanuts, if not free. I remembered reading an article written by my mother's maternal uncle published in an old magazine, Saptahik Hindustan wherein he had compared the expenses incurred at his mother's wedding (which had been documented by his grandfather in his account books) to the present times. That was not a solitary incident. A father narrated how his father-in-law gave him money to arrange his wedding when they migrated to India just before the partition. He carried a t...