A.I. Chatbots Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness; The New York Times, November 17, 2024

Gina Kolata , The New York Times; A.I. Chatbots Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness

"Instead, in a study Dr. Rodman helped design, doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. And, to the researchers’ surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors.

“I was shocked,” Dr. Rodman said.

The chatbot, from the company OpenAI, scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent.

The study showed more than just the chatbot’s superior performance.

It unveiled doctors’ sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they made, even when a chatbot potentially suggests a better one."

He Regulated Medical Devices. His Wife Represented Their Makers.; The New York Times, August 20, 2024

 Christina Jewett, The New York Times; He Regulated Medical Devices. His Wife Represented Their Makers.

"For 15 years, Dr. Jeffrey E. Shuren was the federal official charged with ensuring the safety of a vast array of medical devices including artificial knees, breast implants and Covid tests.

When he announced in July that he would be retiring from the Food and Drug Administration later this year, Dr. Robert Califf, the agency’s commissioner, praised him for overseeing the approval of more novel devices last year than ever before in the nearly half-century history of the device division.

But the admiration for Dr. Shuren is far from universal. Consumer advocates see his tenure as marred by the approval of too many devices that harmed patients and by his own close ties to the $500 billion global device industry.

One connection stood out: While Dr. Shuren regulated the booming medical device industry, his wife, Allison W. Shuren, represented the interests of device makers as the co-leader of a team of lawyers at Arnold & Porter, one of Washington’s most powerful law firms."

A.L.S. Stole His Voice. A.I. Retrieved It.; The New York Times, August 14, 2024

 Benjamin Mueller, The New York Times; A.L.S. Stole His Voice. A.I. Retrieved It.

"As scientists continued training the device to recognize his sounds, it got only better. Over a period of eight months, the study said, Mr. Harrell came to utter nearly 6,000 unique words. The device kept up, sustaining a 97.5 percent accuracy.

That exceeded the accuracy of many smartphone applications that transcribe people’s intact speech. It also marked an improvement on previous studies in which implants reached accuracy rates of roughly 75 percent, leaving one of every four words liable to misinterpretation.

And whereas devices like Neuralink’s help people move cursors across a screen, Mr. Harrell’s implant allowed him to explore the infinitely larger and more complex terrain of speech.

“It went from a scientific demonstration to a system that Casey can use every day to speak with family and friends,” said Dr. David Brandman, the neurosurgeon who operated on Mr. Harrell and led the study alongside Dr. Stavisky.

That leap was enabled in part by the types of artificial intelligence that power language tools like ChatGPT. At any given moment, Mr. Harrell’s implant picks up activity in an ensemble of neurons, translating their firing pattern into vowel or consonant units of sound. Computers then agglomerate a string of such sounds into a word, and a string of words into a sentence, choosing the output they deem likeliest to correspond to what Mr. Harrell has tried to say...

Whether the same implant would prove as helpful to more severely paralyzed people is unclear. Mr. Harrell’s speech had deteriorated, but not disappeared.

And for all its utility, the technology cannot mitigate the crushing financial burden of trying to live and work with A.L.S.: Insurance will pay for Mr. Harrell’s caregiving needs only if he goes on hospice care, or stops working and becomes eligible for Medicaid, Ms. Saxon said, a situation that, she added, drives others with A.L.S. to give up trying to extend their lives.

Those very incentives also make it likelier that people with disabilities will become poor, putting access to cutting-edge implants even further out of their reach, said Melanie Fried-Oken, a professor of neurology at Oregon Health & Science University."

This Code Breaker Is Using AI to Decode the Heart’s Secret Rhythms; Wired, August 15, 2024

 Amit Katwala, Wired; This Code Breaker Is Using AI to Decode the Heart’s Secret Rhythms

"There’s an AI boom in health care, and the only thing slowing it down is a lack of data."

Medical Residents Are in an Uproar Over the 'Ethics' of The Last of Us Finale; Time, March 15, 2023

LAURA ZORNOSA, Time ; Medical Residents Are in an Uproar Over the 'Ethics' of The Last of Us Finale

[Spoilers in linked article]

"“What TLOU story wants you to do is a great deal of suspension of disbelief for quite a lot of your medical/ethical knowledge,” they continued. “This is simply because it wasn’t written for people like us who have a great deal of this knowledge.”"

Joni Mitchell Removes Her Songs From Spotify Over Joe Rogan’s Vaccine Disinfo; The Daily Beast, January 28, 2022

Blake Montgomery, The Daily Beast; Joni Mitchell Removes Her Songs From Spotify Over Joe Rogan’s Vaccine Disinfo

"The move comes after Neil Young, who shares a manager with Mitchell, removed all his music from Spotify for the same reason. Both Young and Mitchell cited an open letter from over 200 doctors decrying disinformation and vaccine hesitancy peddled on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the world. Spotify inked a $100 million deal with Rogan for exclusive distribution rights to his show.

“They can either have Rogan or Young. Not both,” the “Heart of Gold” singer said. He added that the move would likely be a financially damaging one for both himself and his record label.

Both Young and Mitchell are survivors of polio and staunch proponents of vaccination science."

A Facebook request: Write a code of tech ethics; Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2019

Mike Godwin, The Los Angeles Times; A Facebook request: Write a code of tech ethics

"The question isn’t just what rules should a reformed Facebook follow. The bigger question is what all the big tech companies’ relationships with users should look like. The framework needed can’t be created out of whole cloth just by new government regulation; it has to be grounded in professional ethics.

Doctors and lawyers, as they became increasingly professionalized in the 19th century, developed formal ethical codes that became the seeds of modern-day professional practice. Tech-company professionals should follow their example. An industry-wide code of ethics could guide companies through the big questions of privacy and harmful content.

Drawing on Yale law professor Jack Balkin’s concept of “information fiduciaries,” I have proposed that the tech companies develop an industry-wide code of ethics that they can unite behind in implementing their censorship and privacy policies — as well as any other information policies that may affect individuals."

Rude Doctors, Rude Nurses, Rude Patients; New York Times, April 10, 2017

Perri Klass, New York Times; 

Rude Doctors, Rude Nurses, Rude Patients

"Just how much rudeness is there in the hospital, and who bears the brunt of it?

A few weeks ago I wrote about a study that looked at what happens to medical teams when parents are rude to doctors. In these studies of simulated patient emergencies, doctors and nurses working in the neonatal intensive care unit were less effective in teamwork and communication, and in their diagnostic and technical skills, after an actor, playing a parent, made a rude remark about the quality of the hospital."

Troubling examples of ‘pseudoscience’ at the Cleveland Clinic; Washington Post, 1/11/17

Daniel Summers, Washington Post; Troubling examples of ‘pseudoscience’ at the Cleveland Clinic

"People will understandably look for their own answers. Unfortunately, when no less than the president-elect is among those promulgating dangerous misinformation about vaccines, medical providers have to deal with a lot of false, misleading stuff their patients may find.

One way I deal with this is to give patients a list of resources that generally provide good, evidence-based advice. Though I can’t vet every single article they may publish, knowing a few sites that typically give clear, sound information is a valuable resource when patients ask.

Sadly, no matter how glowing its reputation or how superlative the care it routinely provides, I can’t include the Cleveland Clinic on that list. Knowing it promotes treatments that have no grounding in science, or that a patient could stumble upon a fearmongering article that makes baseless claims about the unspecified dangers of environmental toxins on its website, I can’t direct patients there in good faith. Considering its prominence as a renowned medical establishment, that’s a terrible shame.