> The family has certain beliefs about the medical establishment.
Namely, that medical staff (especially doctors) are trained in medical school to have an inflexible way of thinking
This belief saved my mother's life.
We came with complainst of lung issies, for some reason doctors decided allergies are mosh likely but we wanted an X-ray. Months later they finally did a scan and found lung cancer.
I don't know if they are following a flow chart, but when dealing with NHS doctors I sometimes feel like I am talking to a bot.
They have the same routines, for exanple they will never ever check for Vitamin D defficiency, etc.
I cant imagine what will happen once real bots / chatgpt becomes widespread.c
Well as with most beliefs, sometimes it's wrong and sometimes it's right.
I don't know anything about your mother's case, and I don’t personally have any experience with the NHS, so I can't say if it would have been appropriate to get a CT earlier in her case. Maybe it would have been.
I do feel that we as doctors can be too rigid in our decision making sometimes, but my thoughts on this are quite nuanced and probably very different from the average layperson's. It's probably also a multi-page writeup, so I won't get into it here.
In general though, CT scans cause cancer in about 1 out of every 1000 cases [1], so if we ordered them on everyone who asked, we could very well cause more cancer than we diagnosed.
In the US, we already have system that is much more patient driven and much more aggressive on testing than most of western Europe, and we still have worse health outcomes.
I agree with your concerns about Chat GPT. Patients want face to face time and I think they deserve that. Unfortunately that's low hanging fruit for C-suite executives to pick at when cutting costs.
This belief saved my mother's life.
We came with complainst of lung issies, for some reason doctors decided allergies are mosh likely but we wanted an X-ray. Months later they finally did a scan and found lung cancer.
I don't know if they are following a flow chart, but when dealing with NHS doctors I sometimes feel like I am talking to a bot.
They have the same routines, for exanple they will never ever check for Vitamin D defficiency, etc.
I cant imagine what will happen once real bots / chatgpt becomes widespread.c