The Most Important Thing AI Can’t Do in Medicine

She didn’t say anything right away. Finally, she looked up. “My sister was just diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. I’m worried I might have it too.”

For the next 15 minutes I watched as they talked about how she was processing her sister’s diagnosis, her fears about the future, what it all meant for her future colon cancer screening, and why at this point we were most concerned about IBS. 

By the end of the visit, her expression had cleared; I realized I hadn’t noticed how frightened she was. I felt ashamed of myself. What kind of doctor was I going to be? 

My supervising physician and I talked about it. “You learn how to look,” he said. “When you care, you get a feel for it.”

That lesson has stayed at the forefront for me as I’ve watched artificial intelligence sweep through medicine and enter the clinical environment of our internal medicine residency program at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. AI scribes. Chatbots that tell you a differential diagnosis if you put in a patient’s symptoms. Electronic medical record tools that will summarize a patient’s hospital course for you. But they can’t feel.