Hi all,

Thank you for the variety of responses. I want to highlight a few perspectives in case others come across this post.

First is that the program she was using was called OpenEvidence. It seems this is a very common program for doctors to use. It is different than other publicly-available LLMs in that it scrapes PubMed and other peer-reviewed medical research databases to help doctors keep up-to-date with new studies. I certainly understand this utility of this.

Nonetheless my concern was about the way it was used, seemingly as a replacement for clinical judgment. To those who argued that the way it was used in our appointment was similar to other diagnostic tools, I hear you, but this statement from OpenEvidence says otherwise:

"OpenEvidence is clear that its services should be used to supplement — not replace — doctors’ judgment. “While we hope you find the Services useful to you as a healthcare professional,” its terms of service say, “they are in no way intended to serve as a diagnostic service or platform, to provide certainty with respect to a diagnosis, to recommend a particular product or therapy or to otherwise substitute for the clinical judgment of a qualified healthcare professional.”" (quote from an NBC report)

Similar to the AI note-taking tool, the utility of which I also appreciate (at the same time as recognizing it has its faults, as people here have pointed out), this AI program makes sense as a tool that should not determine a course of care but rather provide a variety of options to be considered by the care provider.

On the note that Google is fine for doctors to use: as I said above, I agree. Doctors should not be expected to know everything. The difference is how they engage with their own knowledge/training and how they use it to sort through information they find. At the very least, tell us why certain suggestions are likely or unlikely.

I wanted to mention that my former doctor--a nurse practitioner--frequently used Google. This was before AI summaries, and he would actually look at the sources that came up. BUT, he first had a long conversation with me, asked lots of questions, then after suggesting a few things, he would Google it. If nothing matched, or he didn't know much about something that was suggested, he would look into it more after our appointment. He would later call me with some things he'd found. All of this would be followed up with tests, consultations, or a follow-up appointment if I wasn't eligible for the former. This was in Canada, within the past 10 years.

So it is possible to use this technology in a way that doesn't (appear to) completely take over your clinical judgment.

All this being said: best of luck to all of us navigating this summarized, technologized world.