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Just Months After Jeopardy!, Watson Wows Doctors
kkleiner writes "Following its resounding victory on Jeopardy!, IBM's Watson has been working hard to learn as much about medicine as it can with a steady diet of medical textbooks and healthcare journals. In a recent demonstration to the Associated Press, Watson showed a promising ability to diagnose patients. The demonstration was a success, and it is the hope of IBM and many medical professionals that in the coming years Watson will lend doctors a helping hand as they perform their daily rounds."
Hello Patient, my name is Dr Sbaitso.
I am here to help you.
Say whatever is in your mind freely,
our conversation will be kept in strict confidence.
Memory contents will be wiped off after you leave,
So, tell me about your problems..
Personally, I seriously doubt that Watson will ever advance to being able to replace a doctor for non-trivial complaints. First of all, humans are better at image processing, so if a patient looks like death then they aren't going to ask questions to rule out minor complaints. Second, patients usually don't know how to describe their symptoms, and it's up to the doctor to make sense of what they're describing (keeping in mind that some exaggerate, some understate, and others outright lie). Third, clinical references are written for humans, so they often omit various "obvious" things (e.g. to get Lyme you have to have been bitten by a tick, which may not be very likely in Barrow, Alaska).
OTOH, I can see Watson being immensely useful on the back end. For example, which second-line blood pressure medications have been show to be highly effective with few side effects in 65 year old male caucasians who also have diabetes, and, of those, which has the best interaction profile with the other drugs this patient is taking? Clinical guidelines help, but they're obviously simplified and generalized. It'd take a human ages to research the literature to figure that out, but an AI like Watson could potentially do it in a few seconds. Such a tool could take a lot of the guesswork out of medicine.
Do you think they do plastic surgery because it cures people? Do you think they are treating ulcers with tagamet instead of antibiotics because the antibiotics would cure you fast?
I was starting to listen to what you were saying until I read this.
The current standard treatment for Helicobacter Pylori is a triple-therapy regime which does indeed include antibiotics. It is highly effective and usually results in eradication.
Cimetidine hasn't been used as a treatment for ulcers in since the discovery of H. Pylori, many years ago. Considering that there are a number of modern antibiotics that are active against H. Pylori it is quite rare for a patient to not receive some antibiotic cocktail -- and even if there were a patient who (for some reason) could not receive *any* antibiotics, PPIs would almost certainly be used in place of cimetidine.
I'm sorry you have such a vendetta against physicians. Perhaps your views will change with age. I know that mine certainly did as I entered adulthood.
The real litigious bastards...
As a medical professional (neurologist-in-training, so I know about pain and "pain") these stories make me mad.
There is no such thing as "healing with the hands" if you had a serious limb asymmetry in your hips. If it was mild, it could be corrected with the right shoes and postural exercises to teach you stand the right way. If it was serious, you should have seen an orthopedic surgeon to correct it in a surgical way. If he*fixed* you just by touch the right spots, then you probably didn't have almost anything physical in the first place and most of your symptoms were in your mind.
BEAR WITH ME! I'm not trying to play down your pain and how you felt it, I'm just explaining to you in a rational way that many diseases and maladies are sometimes psychosomatic in origin and extension. I don't imply you are crazy or anything like that. I only say that you just wanted some hands-on caring, you didn't have anything really serious (organic) going on. And that's good news.
Just don't waste too much money on alternative treatments. If an alternative treatment works, then probably help from a family or friend works as well. You don't need a professional. But don't take any chances.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"