{"id":35345,"date":"2025-10-15T18:21:17","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T18:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/im-a-medical-student-at-stanford-learning-about-ais-influence-on-medicine-im-still-optimistic-about-my-future-as-a-doctor\/"},"modified":"2025-10-15T18:21:17","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T18:21:17","slug":"im-a-medical-student-at-stanford-learning-about-ais-influence-on-medicine-im-still-optimistic-about-my-future-as-a-doctor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/im-a-medical-student-at-stanford-learning-about-ais-influence-on-medicine-im-still-optimistic-about-my-future-as-a-doctor\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m a medical student at Stanford learning about AI&#8217;s influence on medicine. I&#8217;m still optimistic about my future as a doctor."},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/68eea8d95dbc4fd10daad89c?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Brian Zhang with two fellow students holding a stanford flag\"\/><figcaption>The author (right) is a medical student at Stanford.<\/p>\n<p>Courtesy of Jack Tse<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#039;m a medical student at Stanford, and AI often comes up in our courses.<\/li>\n<li>Some are worried AI will replace doctors, but I&#039;m remaining hopeful it will be a powerful tool.<\/li>\n<li>I will always put my patients first, and if AI can help me do that, I will embrace it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In one of my courses at Stanford Medical School, my classmates and I were tasked with using a secure AI model for a thought experiment.<\/p>\n<p>We asked it to generate a clinical diagnosis from a fictional patient case: &quot;Diabetic retinopathy,&quot; the chatbot said. When we asked for supporting evidence, it produced a tidy list of academic citations. The problem? The authors didn&#039;t actually exist. The journals were fabricated. The AI chatbot had hallucinated.<\/p>\n<p>This delicate relationship between AI and medicine was a major reason I chose Stanford for medical school. Just a short drive from Silicon Valley&#039;s ecosystem of innovation and AI startups, it felt like the right place to learn about the future of medicine.<\/p>\n<p>I eventually realized this assignment was never about breeding cynicism toward AI. It was Stanford&#039;s attempt at teaching us how to work with it, to recognize its limitations, reflect on our own, and remember that humanity must always come first.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>There are some real fears with AI&#039;s integration into the medical field<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>At a dinner with a friend&#039;s parents, they asked me if I worried about threats to the future of medicine. They mentioned headlines of various deep learning models \u2014which are layered networks that resemble the human brain \u2014 making advancements in healthcare.<\/p>\n<p>Under certain contexts, AI can diagnose cardiac arrest and abnormal heart rhythm with a higher accuracy than board-certified cardiologists. Some of these breakthroughs were born right here at Stanford.<\/p>\n<p>A few days later, during a phone call, my mother shared a story about a teenager who died after confiding in an AI chatbot and discussing plans to end his life. In another course session, we discussed a case of bromism, a syndrome that can result from excessive consumption of sedatives, after a patient had consulted ChatGPT.<\/p>\n<p>There are other real risks: breaches of confidentiality, bias when models learn from data that doesn&#039;t reflect the diversity of patients, and authoritative advice that is misleading or unsafe.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>But I&#039;m putting my patients first<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>In our classrooms at Stanford, cadavers are called &quot;silent teachers.&quot; In the hospital and clinic, patients become our most profound educators. We take home the stories of our patients \u2014 the heartbreak, the pain, the breakthroughs, the hope. I will never forget sitting with a mother who had just lost her son to a fentanyl overdose.<\/p>\n<p>If I approach AI in medicine from a place of fear, particularly fear of losing my job, I have lost. For me, healthcare is about advocating for the <em>best<\/em> outcomes for my patients. If AI enhances clinical diagnosis, distills complex information, or fills in my gaps in knowledge, then it unquestionably deserves a place in my generation of medicine.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, there are negative aspects to AI. But these are not reasons to retreat; they&#039;re reasons to collaborate and find ways to use this tool to help our patients.<\/p>\n<h2>I&#039;m in medical school to improve the lives of many<\/h2>\n<p>In a 2021 interview with The New York Times, my 17-year-old self, then still in high school, said I wanted to become a doctor and open a clinic for immigrants.<\/p>\n<p>After the article was published, a 90-year-old Vietnam War veteran emailed me and asked me to keep that promise. We shook hands outside the Stuyvesant High School auditorium in New York. Years later, a week before I left for medical school, we met again in Manhattan. We had become good friends.<\/p>\n<p>On the steps leading up to Bryant Park, I promised this person \u2014 who had unknowingly become one of my staunchest supporters \u2014 that I would do the best for my future patients.<\/p>\n<p>Even in an AI-driven future, the heart of medicine remains stubbornly, unmistakably human. Thirty years into my practice, even if all I did was help a patient and their family leave my office a little more hopeful and informed than when they arrived, I would have won.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The author (right) is a medical student at Stanford. Courtesy of Jack Tse I&#039;m a medical student at Stanford, and AI often comes up in our courses. Some are worried AI will replace doctors, but I&#039;m remaining hopeful it will be a powerful tool. I will always put my patients first, and if AI can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35346,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-35345","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}