The world has been Geicofying, dumbing things down so the formerly unqualified can do things previously beyond their smarts, skill sets, etc. Technological advances, however, might mean that the “dummifying” of your doctors can be slightly mitigated as technology makes doctors obsolete.
It used to be that you’d hire an electrician, handyperson, etc. because you lacked the knowledge, training, and experience to perform certain tasks. Now, a trip to a big box hardware store or an online video can often provide you with all you need to get the job done on your own.
We see this in many fields. Why not health care? Mirabile dictu, we do!
A movement is afoot to exclude top students and enroll scholastically inferior ones in American medical schools. “Scholastically inferior” persons are those who do worse on standardized tests. Their performance is so bad that, without rigging the system, they would be unqualified to enter medical training.
Some schools have dropped the standardized Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) requirement altogether despite its proving itself an effective and unbiased predictor of success in medical school. Dropping MCAT (and GPA) requirements masks inferior scholarship and, by extension, a lack of qualification.
underrepresented” groups. That they may be “underrepresented” because they are scholastically inferior is irrelevant.
You can’t spell DIE without D-E-I.
Since this trend is happening and is difficult, if not impossible, to reverse—try taking a puppy from a child—the question becomes, “Does it matter if your doctor is dumber (scholastically inferior) than doctors of the past?” Perhaps it matters less than you think.
In the early days of American medical care, when docs were primarily clinicians, care relied heavily on physician-elicited and acquired information. That’s because the doctor was the beginning and end of diagnosis and treatment. There was nothing else out there, e.g., a large support staff or fancy tests. If the doctor was good, the patient did well, and if he was not, the patient did badly.
However, technology’s inexorable progress has interleaved itself so thoroughly into the practice of medicine that many important aspects of clinical care are obsolete or of minimal relevance. For example, consider the simple chest X-ray.
Before its availability, physicians diagnosed lung disease based on a patient’s history and physical exam. The good docs were more knowledgeable, aware, and learned regarding lung disorders than the bad ones.
Chest X-rays made it possible for a less astute clinician to do good medicine. The X-ray’s information rescued him from a potentially missed diagnosis. Clinically diagnosing lung disease was no longer the primary skill; taking quality X-rays and interpreting them was.
This trade-off birthed a new specialty: Radiology. Radiologists had to be smart at taking and interpreting X-rays, not merely of the chest but throughout the body.
As technology proliferated, the ordinary clinician became increasingly dependent on machines, tests, and specialists. Extrapolate from this to other use cases. There are now surgical techs, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, imaging techs, lab techs, etc.
Each of these aides represents the handing over of a physician’s earlier responsibility to a cheaper, scholastically inferior, less trained person. In this manner, the docs themselves proved that the scholastically inferior are capable of doing much of what they do.
This offloading of work by physicians is not the only thing making less intellectually astute people qualified to do part (or all) of the practice of medicine.
Medical artificial intelligence (AI) can perform with expert-level accuracy and deliver cost-effective care at scale. IBM’s Watson diagnoses heart disease better than cardiologists do. Chatbots dispense medical advice for the United Kingdom’s National Health Service in lieu of nurses. Smartphone apps detect skin cancer with expert accuracy. Algorithms identify eye diseases just as well as specialized physicians. Some forecast that medical AI will soon be implemented in 90% of hospitals and replace as much as 80% of what doctors currently do.
AI diagnostic systems are even FDA-approved. When diagnosing retinal disease, you can basically forget about the doctor and the technician. Page the janitor.
The retinal diagnostic system captures images with a retinal camera that can be operated by a non-specialist with minimal training. The images are uploaded to the cloud where software analyzes them. Within minutes, the algorithm can produce a diagnostic interpretation for diabetic retinopathy and an associated report.
Telesurgery, or remote surgery, is a “surgical tool that utilizes both robotic technology and wireless networking to connect patients and surgeons who are geographically distant.” A remote operator moves the robot to perform the procedure. You just have to hope that the operator is as good as a teenage boy with a joystick and is clear about which area needs surgery.
Addressing the latter concern, augmented reality (AR) can overlay the target area on the patient’s body to guide the surgery. That target has earlier been identified through diagnostic testing. To understand how it works, you can see AR used for car repair. The same system is essentially possible for surgery on people. As trained doctors age and their hands become less steady, young’uns with steady hands and the ability to read AR directions can step in.
These technological advances will usher in the Era of the Stupid Physician, just as DEI brings us the woke, brain-dead med student. And by delegating away their skills, physicians brought this on themselves. Add in technology, and it’s only a matter of time before the touchdown is scored and Team Doctors loses.
AI will be the last nail in the healthcare provider’s coffin. It will be a bit different from AI trained on large language models (LLMs) and prone to misinforming / disinforming / mal-informing (by design). What we will see is the rise of SLMs (small language models) trained using the medical literature, minus the pollution from the broad internet.
The trends are clear. For docs, the trend is not their friend. Medicine by Moron is here to stay, and it will make little difference to the patient over time.
Those too stupid (scholastically) to have earned the privilege to practice medicine as one had to in the past will eventually be unemployed, having been replaced by robots (or trained animals unless PETA protests). They’ll survive only if the progressive establishment wants them around.
Medical education is already reflecting this trend:
In a mandatory course on “structural racism” for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” and demanded that they bow down to “mama earth,” according to students in the class and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as “justice,” began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described as a “non-secular prayer” to “the ancestors,” instructing everyone to get on their knees and touch the floor—”mama earth,” as she described it—with their fists…
Gray-Garcia, a local activist who had been invited to speak about “Housing (In)Justice,” proceeded to thank native tribes for preserving “what the settlers call L.A.,”…and to remind students of the city’s “herstory.”
The prayer also included a benediction for “black,” “brown,” and “houseless people” who die because of the “crapatalist lie” of “private property.”
“Mama earth,” Gray-Garcia told the kneeling students, “was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped, or played.”
One could argue that medical school time could be better spent learning about topics more directly related to medicine. No need. Geicofication.
Doctoring is becoming so easy a caveman/woman will do it.
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