Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
To break new ground in treating patients as individuals it would be necessary to
assign physicians to following duties:
•
to show respect for the singularity of a person and its unique case, based on an
attitude of acceptance of the primacy of the first person's perspective
•
to take in account the “bio-psycho-social and moral”-factors and their interplay,
that defines the patient as an individual, not to focus so much on the details and
data mining that makes him countable for the models of medical disease
•
to allocate more time to explore the patient's own narrative and trying to under-
stand him in his own perspective of illness and hope
•
to attach greater significance to the presence and continuity of the physicians in
medical care
•
at last it requests much more space and tolerance for self-defined privacy and
retreat in hospital and rehabilitation.
7.3
Outlook: Why the Physician Basically Can't Be Replaced
by a Medical Expert System. An Analogy
To assume, that - let us say - in some decades time, the physicians will be replaced
by a medical expert system, is the same kind of assumption like: in about 50 years
we'll be able to forecast a soccer game and its result. Such prophecies arise from
the brief believe in the art and ability of computation, in order to render the whole
complexity of such a interplay from the knowledge of the decisive data and all in-
formation we'll have about each player and therefore of the resulting game.
Even if we improve our measure methods and if we'll be able to quantify all
'information' (depending on language, context, method features) about each player
- and even if we'll achieve to simulate a set of possible actions and interactions, it's
basically not possible to forecast the real action neither the interaction and interplay
of the whole participants that we'll happen in fact in a certain moment.
But in respect of a soccer game, no one believes seriously that it will be possible
to forecast its result by computers at any time - and not many people really want to
believe this. Why?
We know by intuition and by experience-based knowledge what a game is - and
perhaps that's the reason, people love it, because of its underdetermined and just-
open, thus 'future opened' character. Although in the case of medical expert sys-
tems, the wish to believe in calculating and forecast is much higher - refusing to see
the analogy. The patient himself as “a bio-psycho-social agent” is also an each time
individual and non-linear working system of high complexity. To be an individual
and to be regarded as it in medical care situations, means a person to be taken as
what it actually
is
: an open networking interplay of the organism parts which are in
a permanent interaction and decision making situation with the psychological and
social interactions one person is permanently involved. Therefore it won't be pos-
sible to render it and decide about diagnosis and therapy by computing in 'medical
expert systems'.
