Are doctors becoming obsolete?
I’ve been working on something lately that’s going to contribute to the revolutionisation of the health industry. It’s pretty exciting, but I’ll update more about it here later. Let’s just say that it will change the way you think about your health and it will hopefully empower you to take control of your wellbeing and live a healthier, more natural life. (and it partly explains my absence over the past couple of months, which I’m very sorry for.)
To the title of this post, there are two things happening in the world of health that have caused me to ask this seemingly absurd question. The first is the internet.
Most of us privileged types with internet access have been able to take control of our health for some time now to a certain extent, through searching for information about conditions, asking doctors questions online and talking to each other on forums and blogs, sharing personal experiences about what worked for us.
Soon we’ll be able to take online tests that will be so intricate that they will be able to produce diagnoses and a personalised health management report, pretty much rivaling the need to visit the doctor for a general health check-up - particularly for those who are especially time-poor. There are already tools to calculate symptoms and provide semi-accurate diagnoses, but these tools are becoming more complex and can now, quite simply, account for thousands of scenarios, arriving at just as detailed an analysis as that of a personal consultation with a physician. Imagine the standard questions your doctor asks you when you present with a cold. How long have you had it? What colour is your mucus? Do you have a headache? A computer system is just as accurate arriving at its diagnosis following this method.
But even in the wake of all this new technology, it seems pretty farfetched could we question whether doctors will become obsolete. We will always need doctors to perform surgery, for example. A machine couldn’t do that - or could it? Twenty years ago we didn’t expect that we’d be able to find out so much information from a few simple keyboard strokes, but even now we’re surprising ourselves with the lengths that we’re pushing our technologies to. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are already robots out there being tested to perform simple operations or even less-complicated procedures like removing teeth.
To the second point now - add this technology talk to the debates about the growing popularity of complementary medicine and naturopathy. So many more people are taking control of their own health and searching for natural solutions to their health problems rather than seeing a traditional doctor. Whether this is fueled by a desire to get back to nature in the wake of the climate change epidemic, or it’s emerging because there is simply more natural health information out there at the moment, the results speak for themselves. And the science is following, with more and more clinical trials focusing on natural ingredients, and combinations of ingredients, to ease symptoms and even prevent conditions.
This is part of a wider shift in health care that is not just about cure but primarily about prevention, one of the premises of natural health and complementary medicine. For centuries we’ve watched as various health epidemics emerged into society, only to feel helpless at the damage and destruction they cause. Plagues and serious diseases centuries ago have been replaced by obesity, AIDs, heart disease and its associated ills, STDs and of course cancers. We may not be able to cure them yet but we know what they are capable of, so the focus is just as much on preventing them - with the benefit of hindsight and scientific research to help us out.
So, doctors, will you embrace this technology and try to work with it, and will you warm to complementary medicine and try to integrate it into your practices, or will you maintain a headstrong opposition? Time will tell, but the revolution is here and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
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