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Microsoft claims AI system better than doctors at diagnosing complex health conditions
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Bullshit Alarm
I don't have any actual studies to back this up (because I'm not sure they exist) but I could see this being the case, in some cases. At least in the west, Some groups who aren't white men - e.g. women or black people - are often not given accurate diagnoses by real doctors, whose training or biases cause conflicts there. If the AI diagnoses can avoid those same biases, it could actually be better for those groups especially.
I'm a white man and I promise you that it's no protection from our shitty medical system. My adult life has been a misery for at least 15 of the past 20 years because of multiple rushed and incorrect diagnoses. There are literally thousands of conditions that the system is incapable of recognizing because they involve multiple specialties, fit between specialties, or are frequently referred to the wrong specialist who won't look for causes outside their specialty.
A lot of it comes down to the limited amount of time Doctors get with the patient. They have to come up with a conclusion in 10-15 minutes, then move on, then it's usually several months before they see the patient again.
I'm not disputing that, but it's fairly well documented in many articles that the health care system has implicit bias against black people and women, it's not just something I'm pulling out of my ass here. So you need to consider that if you feel you're getting poor care as a white man (I'm a white man, too, for the record), black people, women, and especially black women, are getting it far worse.
I didn't claim otherwise, but your understanding of statistics is a little wonky. You can't extrapolate from "white men" to my individual experience and say that minorities are getting it far worse. There are plenty of lucky minority members that never get a bad diagnosis in their life, and plenty of unlucky white men that are plagued by them.
Ever had a sinus headache that lated a real long time? I'm in my 11th year of one nonstop headache, and I still don't know why the fuck it's happening - even after seeing over a dozen specialists all referring me elsewhere after their one or two guesses didn't pan out. Every new referral takes 3-6 months for a first visit.
This is my third such issue. I researched and diagnosed the second issue on my own and found out that my exact misdiagnoses was actually known to be incredibly common, but institutional inertia and specialist blindspots meant that it wasn't being widely corrected despite being known for over 15 years.
So no, being a white man does not offer protection from our shitty healthcare system. Every societal flaw has it's victims, and it's almost always true that minorities and the disenfranchised get it worse. That's no reason to disregard the experiences of non-minorities - many of whom will have it just as bad individually.
Mate, nobody's saying that every single black person or woman has it worse in every way than every single white person. We could play the 'Ah, but this person has this malady that's worse than the last one mentioned!' game for hours and it really means nothing. It's got nothing to do with my understanding of statistics, it's got to do with the fact that I'm trying to make a generalized statement to keep the flow of conversation going, which we kind of have to accept or else having any kind of short-form discourse is impossible.
Here, let me try again.
"Generally speaking, doctors tend towards having implicit biases against black people and women. On average, medical treatment given to white men is more reliable than what's given on average to those two marginalized groups."
Is that really adding any meaningful clarity to a casual discussion? I argue that it does not.
To return to the topic at hand, I don't think, in the vast majority of medical cases, diagnosis is something AI couldn't handle. It's not like every doctor is Dr. House, solving a complicated puzzle to figure out what someone has... it's more or less a flow chart. Patient complains of X, most common causes are A, B and C. Order a test to confirm. Test comes back negative, next most common causes are Y and Z, order a test to confirm.
If AI could solve the majority of cases like this - even if there was a doctor whose whole job it was to take the AI diagnosis, review the symptoms and test results, and say "Yes, this seems correct", it would presumably leave more time for doctors to spend on cases like yours where more attention is perhaps warranted. Or, alternately, maybe AI would have solved it more quickly by not being beholden to the specialist blindspots and institutional inertia that prevented them from correctly identifying it.