Love Your AI
You and your doctor’s AI virtual assistant will be in close touch shortly. Here are a few ways you might want to influence the dialogue.
Artificial intelligence assistants are improving every day, from basic Siri and Alexa to the next generation of full-time life partners. Your personal assistant will analyze all of your emails, texts, and photographs. It will understand the modulation in your voice, the excitement in your emotions, and the fear you project in your skin, tone, and sweat. It will know your exercise levels and your potential and actual fitness. Assessing the world around you, it will anticipate injuries, danger, and opportunities. You will always have the wise coach, father, mother, and teacher in your ear.
From a medical perspective—since most injuries are caused by judgment errors—your injury rate will decline. When you sit in front of your human doctor, you will be empowered with your entire medical history. You won’t need to remember which drugs you took (or forgot to take), or which injuries you’ve had. Your doctor will be empowered with the world’s knowledge, not just their own training and experience. The doctor/patient visit will actually have four of you in the room: you, your doctor, and each of your AI assistants.
The question is: Will your medical care be better?
In our biased opinion, what makes a great doctor/patient relationship is when the patient and doctor love each other.
When the doctor loves the patient, they form a lifelong bond. And that bond means a deep and caring relationship about all the aspects of the patient’s life. In orthopaedics, this is often reflected as an initial exam after an injury, a total body assessment (not just of the injury, but of the entire fitness status of the patient), and the creation of a surgical or non-surgical treatment plan.
Execution of that plan is only the first step in the relationship. Continuous and then intermittent physical exams and fitness tests help realize the goal of using the injury as an excuse to become fitter, faster, and stronger than you have ever been before. This process plays out over the years, as you check in with the team formed to care for you and follow their updated advice as rehabilitation and fitness techniques improve, injection therapies evolve, and your own goals shift with aging. The ultimate goal is to drop dead at age 100, playing the sport you love—and when your doctor and rehabilitation team share that goal with you, the magic and fun of medicine come alive.
In this new AI-driven world, you may also fall in love with your AI, and share your deepest desires and aspirations with it. The AI may then be able to help you match with the doctors and therapists who want to share that journey with you and have the tools to do so.
Love your doctor, love your AI, and love your health for a lifetime. That will be the best medicine.
