With the growth of technology in recent years, the capability of medicine is changing. New ways to treat patients have allowed doctors to create advancements in prosthetic limb printing, medical imaging, and gene editing.
As AI is being developed, many people fear that AI could have a large role in medical treatment, possibly resulting in errors that would not have been made by a human.
However, my mother and the Chief of the Pain Division at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), Dr. Christine Greco, thinks it is unlikely AI will completely replace a doctor, and its diagnoses will always be looked over by a medical professional.
“The idea is that it doesn’t necessarily replace what a doctor does, but it enhances what a doctor can do,” Greco said. “It would never completely replace medical decision making by a physician, but it can help make decisions easier and more accurate.”
I agree with Dr. Greco that AI, no matter how developed, should never decide the life-changing diagnosis of a patient.
Dr. Greco talked about her recent article in the National Library of Medicine, which studied the effects of analgesia in vaso-occlusive episodes.
“We could have done it [the study] 10 years ago, but it would have been a lot more labor intensive, and we have a much better ability to obtain patient care data longitudinally, and retrieve it quickly and easily, and that has greatly improved over the past ten years, even over the past two years,” Dr. Greco said.
Dr. Greco also mentioned a team, led by Dr. Timothy Yu, at BCH, who works on specialized antisense oligonucleotide therapy which creates personalized treatment to combat rare genetic diseases.
“It is precision medicine where he [Dr. Yu] creates a treatment using oligonucleotides which are short strands of DNA or RNA that can suppress gene expression that causes a genetic disease,” Dr. Greco said. “Dr. Yu performs whole genome sequencing to identify and understand the biology of a genetic mutation that causes a certain disease, and then targets the mutation with an antisense oligonucleotide.”
The idea is that it doesn’t necessarily replace what a doctor does, but it enhances what a doctor can do.
— Dr. Christine Greco
However, the ways technology is changing medicine are not always positive. With the advent of more expensive medical equipment, healthcare costs are rising. Many companies can drastically raise the price of their products, and consumers have no other choice but to purchase the overpriced drugs.
On example of this is the EpiPen. According to CBS, the price of a single EpiPen grew nearly 500 percent from 2009 to 2016. This is a blatant attempt to unnecessarily raise the price of a life-saving drug. To achieve results that benefit the patient, medical technology must be effective enough to treat them, while also being cost-efficient.
On the other hand, medical companies must have an incentive to produce medical products. If the cost to produce the drug or the length of its patent goes below a certain level, medical companies will lose money when they produce a drug, and thus have no incentive to do so.
