CHAT GPT AND NEWER TECHNOLOGIES IN MEDICINE: WILL DOCTORS FACE EXTINCTION

Dr Shashivadhanan

The Fourth industrial revolution has brought about convergence of physical, digital and biological world. Newer technologies are disrupting all fields of health care in a distinct way. Recently we have Chat GPT which promises to change the Health Care Landscape. Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) is a type of artificial intelligence based natural language processing software.

It was developed by open AI and launched in Nov 2022. Since then, its spreading faster than the covid pandemic. It has the remarkable ability to choose the most appropriate answer to any posed question with human like conversational ability. The data you feed, is the data which it uses to answer your queries. One must be cautioned, as the answers can be wrong, biased and prejudiced, as it is running on data fed to it by humans. In spite of its short comings in its current form, it promises exciting options to doctors and patients.

For Doctors it can present patient data in a summarized form. It can help physician to choose the right treatment option. With explosion in medical knowledge, it is humanly impossible to keep abreast with the latest in any field. Chat GPT can be a perfect solution to this problem by keeping doctors in synch with the latest in their field of interest. It has immense potential in enhancing doctor patient communication.

Translating clinical notes to patient friendly version / language can create a stronger bond between the two. Communication through patient portals outside the ambit of scheduled appointment will have a lot more relevance. These factors will give doctors time to concentrate more on their core specialty.

For the patients Chat GPT promises to be a harbinger of personalized medicine. Like a virtual assistant, it can warn patient regarding drug sensitivity, drug interaction and predict about their probable response to a prescribed treatment. The dos and don’ts can be tailor made to each patient in a personalized format. The more important question is, “will these disruptive technologies make medical professionals jobless or extinct”? As of now, the answer is,” No”.

These newer technologies when applied to treating humans, needs a fine balance between knowledge, wisdom, creativity, and empathy. Researchers have also found that physician’s sentiment about patients is a dimension to decision making that machines cannot gauge. Arriving at a diagnosis and treating a patient is a nonlinear process. It requires creativity in problem-solving skills and intuition that chat bots, algorithms and robots can never have.

AI can analyze huge complex data. It can come up with treatment options. However, its final interpretation will always be within the realm of humans. Newer technologies are here to help, assist, and empower the care giver and not, to compete in deliverance of health care. AI, Big Data Analysis, Machine Learning, Robots, 3D printing, Quantum computing Nanotechnology and now Chat GPT are technologies which are double edged swords. If harnessed ethically it can transform humans to superhumans. If not, the entire human race may face extinction. In which direction it goes, only time will tell.