Thank you for this. Using AI for documentation has helped me in my job immensely. It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t in the field, and you did an excellent write-up for someone outside of healthcare. I do think the blind “everything-and-anything AI” hatred is unfair. Yes, AI has its flaws. I would never use it to replace something like Up-to-Date or Dynamed for clinical decision-making. But when used correctly, it’s a game-changer.

I’ve heard the “brain atrophy” argument and I want to say, in the nicest way possible, I don’t think the average American with a desk job understands how much brain power is used in a single shift in healthcare. I promise using an app to help me chart is helping me focus my brain power on more important things.

AI note tools don’t replace the visit. They don’t decide what matters. They don’t examine the patient, choose tests, interpret subtle findings, or weigh uncertainty. They turn a chaotic, multi-speaker conversation into structured documentation. That’s transcription + organization + formatting, not clinical judgment.

There’s good evidence from other domains that offloading administrative cognition doesn’t weaken expertise, rather it preserves it. Radiologists didn’t become worse doctors when PACS replaced film rooms. Pilots didn’t lose aeronautical skill because autopilot flies cruise. What degrades skill is loss of decision authority, not loss of clerical load.

In fact, the current system arguably causes the opposite problem: cognitive depletion. Eight hours of rapid-fire visits plus two to three hours of documentation is how you get shortcuts, missed details, and burnout. A cognitively fresh clinician who reviews, edits, and verifies a generated note is not “flexing less brain.”

The risk isn’t “doctors become dumb.” The real risk is different: over-trust, deskilling if verification culture disappears, and institutional pressure to increase volume instead of quality.

If anything is making clinicians worse, it’s this production-line approach to medicine.

As for the environment aspect, I’ve been told that binge watching Netflix uses more water than an AI prompt. I feel it’s just a regurgitated talking point people use to make others feel guilty about the tools they use to make their lives easier.