The curious side effects of medical transparency
&gt; I welcome the day artificial intelligence makes most doctors obsolete.<p>Guess you deleted this part.<p>When this becomes reality, let me know. If a better system existed given the current set of parameters, I believe it would have come into existence. Give me any medical condition, and I would take my chances in the US healthcare system over any other option.<p>My argument is not that physicians are error proof or that they don&#x27;t cause harm through errors. It is to refute your claim that &quot;most doctors are terrible&quot;.<p>Your AI system would only be accurate at diagnosis if it has all the pertinent data and unlimited resources. Patients often provide an unclear history, their symptoms are not common for their underlying condition, and there are not enough resources to do a full workup for every complaint.<p>Regarding your second link regarding misdiagnosis in emergency rooms, you just need to look at the PERC rule or the HEART score that ED physicians use for evaluating for pulmonary embolus or acute coronary syndrome to get a somewhat clearer picture of the deviation. Even with scores of zero, there will be a substantial amount of missed diagnoses. Not everyone who goes to the emergency room is going get a full cardiac evaluation or a CT angiogram of the chest if their symptoms don&#x27;t suggest the illness. There are not enough resources to do this.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mdcalc.com&#x2F;calc&#x2F;347&#x2F;perc-rule-pulmonary-embolism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mdcalc.com&#x2F;calc&#x2F;347&#x2F;perc-rule-pulmonary-embolism</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mdcalc.com&#x2F;calc&#x2F;1752&#x2F;heart-score-major-cardiac-events" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mdcalc.com&#x2F;calc&#x2F;1752&#x2F;heart-score-major-cardiac-e...</a><p>Of course other civilian professions don&#x27;t have death rates this high. They don&#x27;t deal with dying people every day. Again, I&#x27;m not claiming that the medical field is perfect as it is. I just believe you are mischaracterizing data for which there are many intricacies.<p>You are also throwing out a lot of strawmen regarding race and sex which bears little relevance to your initial claim.<p>Regarding your final piece of data about the amount of misdiagnosed heart attack cases, look at the following sentence in the same article<p>&gt; It estimated that, if heart attack patients were correctly diagnosed initially then – over the decade of study – over 250 deaths per year might have been prevented.<p>250 * 9 = 2250 preventable deaths over a 9 year period.<p>Far less alarming than the data you present of 198,534 missed diagnoses.