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The Myth
"AI shouldn't be near medicine" misses how AI is actually being deployed clinically: under physician supervision, on narrowly-scoped tasks (imaging, triage, documentation), with FDA oversight for diagnostic devices. 700+ AI-enabled medical devices are FDA-cleared. Direct-to-patient diagnostic AI is the exception, not the rule.
Sources:FDA AI/ML-enabled medical devicesNEJM AI Clinical Studies
The Reality
General-purpose chatbots DO confidently produce wrong medical information, and patients who use them as primary medical advice without clinician involvement face real risk. Bias in training data shows up as worse model performance for underrepresented populations. Hospital AI procurement is uneven; deployment without validation has caused documented harms.
The Positive Path
AI is detecting cancers in screening imaging years earlier than human radiologists alone. AI scribes are giving primary-care physicians ~2 hours of their day back. AlphaFold has accelerated drug discovery to the point that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized it. The right use of AI in medicine is *augmentation under supervision*, and that's where most clinical AI today actually lives.