Discover the promise and challenges of AI in medicine from a physician’s view, focusing on its effects on patient care, safety, empathy, and the importance of human connection and ethical responsibility.
Artificial intelligence is no longer a speculative concept in medicine. It is increasingly embedded in the way we deliver care, document encounters, communicate with patients, and even conceptualize research. Samantha Kubota’s recent piece, “How AI is quietly rewriting the rules of modern medicine,” summarizes insights from the podcast series hosted by Microsoft Research President Peter Lee. The article is engaging and hopeful, and it captures many of the exciting opportunities AI brings to the field.
But as a physician, I read it with a dual lens: curiosity and caution. Samantha is not a physician, and while she highlights important themes—empathy in communication, error detection, access in underserved areas, blurring specialty boundaries, and accelerating drug discovery—her perspective does not fully grapple with the realities on the ground and in the office.
Medicine is not just about technology or efficiency. It is about trust, human connection, safety, and ethical responsibility. AI can help us, but it also introduces profound challenges: practical, legal, emotional, and philosophical. In this blog post, I want to reflect on each of the article’s themes, layering in the physician’s experience. What does it actually feel like to have AI draft your patient responses? What risks do we face when machines double-check our dosing? How do we reconcile innovation with the messiness of the exam room, the complexity of human illness, and the limits of algorithms?
This is not a rejection of AI. I believe AI is a powerful tool with extraordinary potential. But I also believe that unless physicians, nurses, and patients remain at the center of these conversations, we risk building a system that is efficient yet impersonal, accurate yet unsafe, innovative yet inequitable.
