• exanime@lemmy.today
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    4 months ago

    Garbage… We have had services with real nurses doing telemedicine and it tends to suck

    Essentially, the lack of actual information from a video chat (as opposed to an in person meeting), coupled with the “better cover the company’s ass and not get sued”, devolves into every call ending in “better go to the ER to be safe”

    • Riskable@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      Telemedicine is fantastic and an amazing advancement in medical treatment. It’s just that people keep trying to use it for things it’s not good at and probably never will be good at.

      For reference, here’s what telemedicine is good at:

      • Refilling prescriptions. “Has anything changed?” “Nope”: You get a refill.
      • Getting new prescriptions for conditions that don’t really need a new diagnosis (e.g. someone that occasionally has flare-ups of psoriasis or occasional symptoms of other things).
      • Diagnosing blatantly obvious medical problems. “Doctor, it hurts when I do this!” “Yeah, don’t do that.”
      • Answering simple questions like, “can I take ibuprofen if I just took a cold medicine that contains acetaminophen?”
      • Therapy (duh). Do you really need to sit directly across from the therapist for them to talk to you? For some problems, sure. Most? Probably not.

      It’s never going to replace a nurse or doctor completely (someone has to listen to you breathe deeply and bonk your knee). However, with advancements in medical testing it may be possible that telemedicine could diagnose and treat more conditions in the future.

      Using an Nvidia Nurse™ to do something like answering questions about medications seems fine. Such things have direct, factual answers and often simple instructions. An AI nurse could even be able to check the patient’s entire medical history (which could be lengthy) in milliseconds in order to determine if a particular medication or course or action might not be best for a particular patient.

      There’s lots of room for improvement and efficiency gains in medicine. AI could be the prescription we need.

      • exanime@lemmy.today
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        4 months ago

        Yes, I was a bit too extreme with my answer above, however, you’ll be hard pressed to find people who don’t already know, to formulate such a good question as:

        can I take ibuprofen if I just took a cold medicine that contains acetaminophen?"

        Refilling meds, absolutely… As long as the AI has access and can accurately interpret your medical history

        This subject is super nuanced but the gist of the matter is that, at the moment, AI has been super hyped and it’s only in the best interest of the people pumping this hype to keep the bubble growing. As such, Nvidia selling us the opportunities in AI, is like wolves telling us how Delicious, and morally sound it is to eat sheep 3 times daily

        Oh and I don’t know what kind of “therapy” you were referring to… But any psy therapy simple cannot be done by AI… You might as well tell people to get a dog or “when you feel down, smile”