21st Century Medicine

The physician of the future

In the past doctors had well defined roles. You knew that if you studied a certain textbook and did your time in your chosen field you would most definitely attain your goal, whether that goal was to run a thriving GP practice, become a world renowned specialist, or something in between.

Nowadays what you’re expected to know in medical school is a combination of rapidly evolving published literature and the path to success is becoming increasingly convoluted. Sometimes just figuring out how to get from point A (medical school) to point B (your chosen career) is overwhelming, not to mention the effort it takes to establish yourself once you’ve “made it”.

20 years ago, all you had to do was study hard and pass exams, now you’re required to be a published author, to have attended conferences… and the list goes on. Not to mention the ever increasing risk of litigation, so now not only do you have to master medicine, you have to wrap your mind around the law and the constitution.

Luckily we have advanced technology to help us attain our goals. We have powerful computers and search engines (eg. Google/ Pubmed) to help us retrieve and synthesise information. AI is also improving and very soon we may not have to study at all as AI may do that for us, it is also able to write research papers. This of course raises moral and ethical concerns, is AI reliable and can it be trusted to manage our patients and train students and where do we draw the line?

Post Covid we have also realised the limitations of modern doctors; physical, psychological and emotional. At the end of the day we are also human and vulnerable to contracting contagious diseases, we are also vulnerable to burnout. In the past we did not have alternatives but nowadays we have robots which are able to work in proximity to patients with life threatening infections and which do not require 8 hours of sleep to function safely.

This is both exciting and scary. Will the doctor of the future be human or are we entering a time where Sci-fi becomes reality.

Nobody knows, all we know is that there will need to be a person behind the machine but the question is what will the role of that person be? For the time being the world is in desperate need of well trained medical professionals, but as usual it is important for us to stay abreast of current developments so that we are prepared for whatever the future holds.