If A.I. Can Diagnose Patients, What Are Doctors For?
In 2017, Matthew Williams, a thirtysomething software engineer with an athletic build and a bald head, went for a long bike ride in the hills of San Francisco. Afterward, at dinner with some [...]
Can A.I. Find Cures for Untreatable Diseases—Using Drugs We Already Have?
When David Fajgenbaum was a twenty-five-year-old medical student, at the University of Pennsylvania, he started to feel so tired that he could barely stand. Fajgenbaum, a former college [...]
Can the Human Body Endure a Voyage to Mars?
On March 2, 2016, at around 9 A.M. local time, in Kazakhstan, Scott Kelly plunged through the Earth’s atmosphere in a Soyuz spacecraft travelling at seventeen thousand miles an hour. As expected, [...]
Yes, drug-assisted treatment is needed for opioid-addicted patients in U.S. prisons
Among my first memories as a doctor was a disheveled man, barely older than me, handcuffed to a hospital bed, vomiting a thin brown liquid into a pale pink bucket. Between retches, he sobbed and [...]
Health care needs less #innovation
Health care has caught the innovation bug. An industry famously resistant to change suddenly can’t stop innovating — or at least saying it is. Silicon Valley startups are disrupting health care. [...]
A.I. Could Worsen Health Disparities
Artificial intelligence is beginning to meet (and sometimes exceed) assessments by doctors in various clinical situations. A.I. can now diagnose skin cancer like [...]