Complex yet easy
It’s clear that we all have limitations. And that’s a fact, not a personal
opinion. The Medicine itself it’s not a subject hard to understand. It’s ruled
by some complex processes but easy to understand. When you begin studying
medicine, you start learning those biological terms and functions, just to be
able to understand the human body as a whole. But in the last courses, these
concepts are literally thrown away, to start learning actuation algorithms that
you will use in the Hospital.
A Doctor’s work is making
decisions. Making decisions based in the scientific knowledge. That requires
training and a lot of effort memorizing extensive protocols. Most of those
decisions are made by measuring variables and parsing them into algorithms that
were established by a scientific community related to that specific
pathology. So yes, most of the medical decisions are just algorithms.
As a student, for me, the most exciting part of treating a patient is
the diagnosis. They say diagnosis is half art and half science; the use of
intuition and knowledge, to give a name to the diseases of the patient. But
lets be honest. Intuition is not necessary at all. Intuition is the way we call
to the process of matching signs & symptoms with the diseases we already
know. Is the way we call to our internal computation. So if everything can
be reduced to variables and algorithms, why aren’t computers making diagnostics
?
The human factor
Behind every decision there MUST be a human, because every case is particular and sometimes the diagnostic is no enough to determine the an actuation.
What’s the solution then ?
There is not an easy one. But trying to ease the public health system with computer based diagnosis could be one. Most of the diseases suffered by patients are easy to determine with very little variables. Embracing the use of automated machines to make those fast diagnostics could help the doctors in various ways.
- Having more time to have a good relationship with the patient. (In Spain, visit lasts about 7 minutes each.)
- Spending less time writing a medical record in a computer.
- Doctors could have more free time to do more research.
- Creating a DB with all the inputs easies a lot epidemiological studies.
Doctor’s should not be afraid of the incorporation of those technologies to
their work, but the reality is that they are afraid of being supplanted by one
of those machines. They don’t want to see that their skills & knowledge
could be empowered by these tools.
Our occupation is one of the
few that isn’t taking advantage of computer science.
Research is
the future of the medicine, and a place where machines will not easily replace
human.