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...
It all started with cases. I was on the lookout for cases. The cases of lawyers and doctors. The round ones, square ones, or the oblong ones, and the others that lay obscured. Eventually, I found them. They could never have escaped notice from an observant eye. Mine, I doubted, especially with the near vision defect so usual at my age. Nevertheless, I had come a long way. Searching the internet was becoming my forte. If researchers were to configure reports, they could amass volumes of vital information. I harped on ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,’ and my list became a Schindler’s List. Meaningfully, I braced and donned the detective hat for the quest for cases. What I discovered knocked me down. These were always there -the cases. I Googled, only to know what I had overlooked in my desperation for something worthwhile. I read it all over again. My cases nestled with “Noun is a name of a person, place, or thing.” Do I need to know more about cases? Why not? I giggled my way to th...