Bye bye Mr. Doctor

In a near future we won’t have any more human doctors. How can I be so sure?
Being a doctor means analizing some data to be able to make a hopefully acurate diagnostic. From diagnostic to treatment is then straight forward.
Here the dificult part is to make a good diagnostic. What makes a good doctor? a good doctor is someone who makes acurate diagnostics most of the time. They increase their accuracy slowly over the years. A doctor with 30 years of experience may have seen roughly 120,000 patients in his/her whole working life. Where do I get this number?

roughly 200 working days per year
times
roughly 20 patients seen per day
make
4000 patients seen per year
times
30 years
make
120.000 patients seen in a doctor’s working life

120,000 may seem like a lot but don’t forget that most of them will belong to the same conditions. Mainly flu, headaches, back pain, …

Now let’s look at it from a diferent perpective. Imagine if, instead of just your own patients, you could have in your mind every patient that was ever treated by a doctor anywhere in the world. Instead of thousands of cases we’ll be talking about millions and billions of cases.
Wow!
How that would improve a doctor’s rate of acuracy in his/her diagnostic?
That’s what a computer and Artificial Inteligence can do.

Appart from this, Artificial Inteligence can also infer new knowledge. Machine learning will create new knowledge day after day, hour after hour.
It will be imposible for any human doctor to know as much as a machine. Not even studing for a hundred years. And in those hundred years machine learning techniques will have created new knowledge that it will take another thousand years to the human doctor to keep up.

Ok, now let’s move now to the wearables and insidables arena. Today the amount of information a doctor has to review to make a diagnostic is quite limited in most of the cases. Some symtoms, some X-rays and a little bit more.
With the explosion of wearables and insidables (devices attached or inside your body) in very few years we will be measuring pretty much everything 24 hours a day in realtime. From your heart rate, antioxidant levels in your skin, blood and urine analitycs, if you have taken a pill or not, …
All this huge amounts of information will be sent to a computer minute after minute and second after second.
And the best part of it is that everything will happen automatically, without you having to do anything.
Can you imagine a doctor having to analize all this data in real time? No way! we will need at least ten doctors 24 hours a day for every patient to be tracked.
Doctors, I mean machines, we’ll be able to predict what will happen to you before it happens and therefore treating you accordingly so it never happens.

Who will want to be diagnosed by a human doctor instead of a machine doctor?
Not me!

If you are a human doctor don’t worry because this proffesion won’t disapear. It’s just that you won’t be doing diagnostics anymore. Doctors may even be called something else.

Isn’t this exciting?
In ten years time we will be looking back and we’ll be saying “Wow! they had to be diagnosed by human doctors!”, “How could they live without machine doctors?”
I guess the feeling will be similar to us looking back today and think about when anesthesia was not invented yet.
Imagine having surgery being awake!
Imagine being diagnosed by a human doctor!