Doctors and nurses need to be replaced by computers and robots

[xoxoxoBruce]

A post on City-Data.com makes a case for handing much of medicine over to robots and computers.
He/She makes some interesting arguments and links the data they base it on.

A few statements I plucked...

"Wellpoint's Samuel Nessbaum has claimed that, in tests, Watson's successful diagnosis rate for lung cancer is 90 percent, compared to 50 percent for human doctors"

There is a profit motive in medicine as practiced by human doctors that increases costs.

According to (7), 210,000 to 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death. Computers will never make errors due to fatigue, unlike humans. Older doctors make a much larger amount of errors (8). This wouldn't apply to AI or properly maintained machines.

There are 1.7 million hospital-associated infections per year in the U.S. (9).
Many of these infections could be prevented through increased use of robots and computers.

The family doctors are likely the biggest cause for concern. For example: "The majority of the sample reported that they prescribe psychotropic medication to their patients, despite often assessing their knowledge of psychotropics as absent or marginal" (13)

There's a lot more, that's a small sample. To a lay person some of the points seem valid, but I'm sure there are good, logical, counter arguments too.
I think it's an interesting glimpse at what may be, at least in part, the future of medicine.

[Lamplighter]

...I think it's an interesting glimpse at what may be, at least in part, the future of medicine...

We need to develop the computer/robot medicine practices.
Otherwise, who is going to diagnose and treat all those driver-less car accidents of the future.

[Griff]

ba-dump-tss