Okay Amos, you have some valid points. But I have to take issue with some of your statements. We as physicians, generally are life-long learners. We have to read and digest for our maintenance of certification. Many are involved in quality improvement projects.
There are some things I still do just like I learned in Med School, but there are whole swaths of things that we do/see/interpret differently now. So… to generalize that we don’t learn and change is insulting.
I will say that the volume of information that LLMs can consume and process is amazing. I use it daily. Am I skeptical? A bit. But I am not so arrogant to say I am right and it is wrong.
Thank you. I take your point, and I certainly did not mean to suggest that physicians do not learn or change. Quite the opposite: medicine is built on lifelong learning, maintenance of competence, quality improvement, and the willingness to revise practice when better evidence or better tools emerge.
My point was narrower: AI is now becoming one of those tools that requires its own clinical competency. A competency we did not learn in Medical School, and still don't learn enough. Just as we had to learn how to interpret ultrasound, fetal monitoring, laparoscopy, genomics, or new imaging, we now need to learn how to use medical AI responsibly, including how to ask better questions, supply the right clinical context, check outputs, identify uncertainty, and avoid accepting confident but unsupported answers.
So yes, physicians deserve credit. But because we are lifelong learners, we should also recognize that “using AI” is not the same as being competent in clinical AI. That competency has to be taught, practiced, assessed, and continually improved.
Okay Amos, you have some valid points. But I have to take issue with some of your statements. We as physicians, generally are life-long learners. We have to read and digest for our maintenance of certification. Many are involved in quality improvement projects.
There are some things I still do just like I learned in Med School, but there are whole swaths of things that we do/see/interpret differently now. So… to generalize that we don’t learn and change is insulting.
I will say that the volume of information that LLMs can consume and process is amazing. I use it daily. Am I skeptical? A bit. But I am not so arrogant to say I am right and it is wrong.
Give us some credit…
Thank you. I take your point, and I certainly did not mean to suggest that physicians do not learn or change. Quite the opposite: medicine is built on lifelong learning, maintenance of competence, quality improvement, and the willingness to revise practice when better evidence or better tools emerge.
My point was narrower: AI is now becoming one of those tools that requires its own clinical competency. A competency we did not learn in Medical School, and still don't learn enough. Just as we had to learn how to interpret ultrasound, fetal monitoring, laparoscopy, genomics, or new imaging, we now need to learn how to use medical AI responsibly, including how to ask better questions, supply the right clinical context, check outputs, identify uncertainty, and avoid accepting confident but unsupported answers.
So yes, physicians deserve credit. But because we are lifelong learners, we should also recognize that “using AI” is not the same as being competent in clinical AI. That competency has to be taught, practiced, assessed, and continually improved.
I agree with that and it is a new way to think. But we are working on it!