“The chatbot will see you now.” When the nurse tells you that as you sit in the doctor’s waiting room, perhaps it’s time for you to run.

Artificial intelligence is getting lots of attention lately in many walks of life. It may be useful in writing term papers and preparing speeches. It may be helpful in designing new cars and other forms of mechanical equipment. But I’m not sure it’s ready to replace your doctor.

A recent study was reported at the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons meeting in San Francisco by Branden Rafael Sosa and colleagues at the Weill Cornell Medical School. They analyzed the validity and accuracy of the information for orthopedic procedures that large language model chatbots provided to patients. They also assess how the chatbots explained basic orthopedic concepts, integrated clinical information into decision-making and addressed patient queries.

They concluded that large language model chatbots may provide misinformation and inaccurate musculoskeletal health information to patients.

In the study, Sosa and colleagues prompted OpenAI ChatGPT 4.0, Google Bard and BingAI chatbots to each answer 45 orthopedic-related questions in the categories of “bone physiology,” “referring physician” and “patient query.” Two independent, masked reviewers scored responses on a scale of zero to four, assessing accuracy, completeness, and useability.

Researchers analyzed the responses for strengths and limitations within categories and among the chatbots. They found that when prompted with orthopedic questions, OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Bard and BingAI provided correct answers that covered the most critical points in 77%, 33% and 17% of queries, respectively. When providing clinical management suggestions, all chatbots displayed significant limitations by deviating from the standard of care and omitting critical steps in workup, such as ordering antibiotics before cultures or neglecting to include key studies in diagnostic workup.

“I think clinical context is one of the things that they struggled with most and particularly when coming up with an assessment or a plan for a patient who presents with infection. Oftentimes, they forgot to get cultures before initiating antibiotics, forgetting to order radiographs and the workup of a patient with hip osteoarthritis, or to the point of seminal papers that highlight changes in the way that treatment is delivered,” Sosa told Healio/Orthopedics Today.

“I would say that in certain applications, AI chatbots, in particular ChatGPT, performed pretty well. It was able to give clinically useful information in the majority of cases, broadly speaking. But that generally good performance carries with it some significant risks as well,” said Matthew B. Greenblatt, M.D., PhD, an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, and co-author of the study.

Greenblatt said results of this study highlight the importance of oversight by subject matter experts in using large language model chatbots in clinical contexts. “It could potentially be a timesaver or helpful in summarizing information. When all of that is overseen and checked by someone who is truly an expert, one can be well aware of where the chatbot led astray,” Greenblatt said.

Personally, I don’t want to go to a doctor who at best is only correct 77% of the time. I believe there is still a place for good old human physicians and human intelligence in this world of increasing technology and artificial intelligence.

Ever since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, in the Dobbs decision, pro-abortion liberals have been pretending that abortion is unavailable in the U.S. In truth, there is no evidence the number of abortions has declined. In fact, the evidence is to the contrary.

The Guttmacher Institute recently released data showing in the first 10 months of 2023, there were an estimated 878,000 abortions in the U.S. health care system, 94% as many abortions as were provided in 2020 (930,000). At that rate, 2023 would easily eclipse the number of abortions done in 2020.

They state “The actual increase in abortions is likely even larger than these numbers suggest because these counts do not include abortions occurring outside the formal health care system, which are likely to have increased substantially following the implementation of state bans and restrictions.”

They go on to say many factors have contributed to more abortions in 2023, including the following:

• Abortions were already increasing in many US states prior to theDobbs decision, as reported in Guttmacher’s 2020 Abortion Provider Census: Abortions increased by 8% from 2017 to 2020, reversing 30 years of a declining abortion rate.
• Interstate travel for abortion care has increased, largely facilitated by practical support networks(like abortion funds) that have helped patients navigate financial and logistical barriers.
• Access to abortion has increased instates that passed protective abortion policies following the fall of Roe v. Wade. 
• Abortion provided via telehealth has become increasingly available.

All this information from an institute that promotes abortion.

Which begs the question, why are liberals lying about the availability of abortion? The most recent propaganda is the U.S. has a “pregnancy crisis” due to supposedly soaring maternal mortality, not to declining fertility.

Allysia Finley, writing for The Wall Street Journal, reports that the American Medical Association claims the U.S. stands out among high-income nations for its alarming incidence of maternal deaths despite substantial health care spending. These liberal activists invoke U.S. maternal mortality to advocate expanded government welfare programs and abortion access.

“Evidence and experience show us conclusively that the risk of death during or after childbirth is approximately 14 times greater than the risk of death from abortion-related complications,” the AMA says. Democratic states echo this claim in a friend-of-the-court brief in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which the Supreme Court will hear Tuesday. Justices who were about to overturn Roe v. Wade would have “blood on their hands,” the medical journal Lancet warned in a May 12, 2022, editorial.

Finley explains, as with the Covid pandemic, experts are using bad data to drive a political agenda. A new study this month in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology shows that oft-cited U.S. maternal-mortality statistics are inflated owing to discrepancies in how pregnancy deaths are recorded.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System reports that maternal-mortality rates in the U.S. have roughly tripled since 2001, to 32.9 per 100,000 live births in 2021. This is nearly three times as high as rates in other developed countries—but, as the study concludes, it’s largely a statistical artifact.

Deaths among pregnant women or new mothers are often classified as “maternal” even if they owe to other causes, such as cancer or pre-existing conditions. The culprit is a check box that states added to death certificates in 2003 to identify women who had died while pregnant or between 42 days and a year of when their pregnancy ended.

As the study explains, this check box “led to a rapid increase in reported maternal mortality rates” and “some egregious errors,” including hundreds of women over 70 “being certified as pregnant at the time of death or in the year before death” largely because of administrative errors.

 Researchers reanalyzed mortality data to identify only deaths that occurred during pregnancy or postpartum that had at least one mention of pregnancy among the causes of death on the certificate. The authors found that the maternal mortality rate remained essentially flat between 1999 and 2002 (10.2 per 100,000 live births) and 2018 and 2021 (10.4). This would put the U.S. on par with other developed countries.

Lest you think the AMA is a credible source of information, you should know that only about 12% of all U.S. physicians are members of the AMA. Personally, I dropped my AMA membership about 30 years ago as soon as I realized they were promoting abortion back then. It seems nothing has changed since then.

The month of March marked the 4^th year anniversary of the Covid pandemic as it hit the United States. Who can forget when Vice President Mike Pence announced the White House’s “15 days to slow the spread” campaign? It was an unprecedented initiative by the federal government to begin lockdowns, school closings, and other sweeping measures to mitigate the spread of Covid-19, a novel coronavirus that came to us from China.

Four years later we can assess the damage done by those measures and evaluate their effectiveness in containing the virus. Unfortunately, the analysis is ugly. Dr. Scott Atlas, Stanford University Medical School professor, and Steve H. Henke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, tell us the sordid truth in an article published in The Wall Street Journal. They say, “None of those policies were successful, and many were gravely damaging.”

They tell us the Covid health benefits of mandatory lockdowns were tiny. Lockdowns in the U.S. prevented between 4,000 and 16,000 Covid deaths. In an average year 37,000 Americans die from the flu, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lockdowns also failed to reduce infections more than a trivial amount, in part because people voluntarily alter their behavior when a bad bug is in the air. Coercive government policies generated few benefits—and massive costs.

Public-health agencies exacerbated the damage by failing to keep their heads and follow standard pandemic-management protocols. Before 2020, it was recognized that communities respond best to pandemics when government measures are only minimally disruptive. During Covid, however, officials junked that practice by green-lighting restrictive practices and intentionally stoking fear. That response overlaid enormous economic, social, educational and health harms on top of those caused by the virus.

Those harms are captured, in part, in excess deaths—the number beyond what would have been expected without a pandemic. Non-Covid excess deaths from lockdowns, the shutdown of non-Covid medical care, and societal panic are estimated at nearly 100,000 between April 2020 and at least the end of 2021. The number of lockdown and societal-disruption deaths since 2020 is likely around 400,000, as much as 100 times the number of Covid deaths the lockdowns prevented.

The best measure of health performance during the pandemic is all-cause excess mortality, which captures the overall number of deaths relative to the expected level, encompassing Covid and lockdown-related deaths. On this measure Sweden—which kept most schools open and avoided strict lockdown orders—outperformed nearly every country in the world.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the U.S. “would have had 1.60 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Sweden, 1.07 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Finland, and 0.91 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of France.” In America, states that imposed prolonged lockdowns had no better health outcomes when measured by all-cause excess mortality than those that stayed open. While no quantifiable relationship between lockdown severity and a reduction in Covid health harms has been found, states with severe lockdowns suffered significantly worse economic outcomes.

What was the impact of closing hospitals and cutting off access to non-Covid healthcare?

The authors tell us, “Closing hospitals and cutting off access to non-Covid healthcare generated a fear of entering medical facilities. That was a profound mistake, as was encouraging the false belief that hospitals were too busy to treat people who needed care. Healthcare utilization rates were at low levels between 2020 and 2022. In spring 2020, nearly half of the nation’s some 650,000 chemotherapy patients didn’t get treatment, and 85% of living organ transplants weren’t completed. One study found that there were 35.6% fewer calls for cardiac emergencies after March 10, 2020, compared with the year prior. Emergency-room visits were down between 40% and 50%, according to an estimate in May 2020. That doubtless contributed to observed non-Covid excess deaths and may continue to do so, as Americans suffer from undetected cancers and other long-term conditions. Healthcare uptake is still lower than pre-pandemic levels.”

While school closings had no offsetting public-health benefits, the attendant isolation led to massive increases in psychiatric illness, self-harm, obesity and substance abuse. Healthy children were always at vanishingly small risk from Covid, and nearly all of them were infected at some point anyway, according to CDC data. Like a regressive tax, these harms were severest for lower-income and minority students.

Unfortunately, this experience has left many Americans wondering where to turn for honest, accurate information in a medical crisis. They have lost faith in our public-health institutions. It’s not clear how that faith can ever be restored.