AI Medical Assistants and Pain

Over the holidays, I experienced searing, acute physical pain related to a tooth/dental issue.

I cut short a visit to Barcelona (an amazing city!) to return home to have it dealt with, and luckily am now fully healed up.

Over the three weeks of pain, research, and ultimate resolution, I learned a few useful things:

1. AI assistants are game changers for navigating the healthcare system. Over the course of my ordeal, I exchanged probably 75 messages with ChatGPT examining every aspect of my diagnosis. It served as a steady source of advice, a therapist of sorts (there’s only so much your friends and family want to hear about your pain!), and a practical conversational coach as I sought to ask the right questions of dentists to ensure my treatment plan was sound. For example, I uploaded the dentist proposals and asked for an analysis, and asked it to summarize my symptoms and treatments to date so I could provide a succinct synopsis to a specialist. With a good memory (memory is key in AI!), it would reference back to comments and symptoms I had expressed days earlier as part of making go-forward suggestions.
2. I now understand why people get addicted to painkiller drugs even though I didn’t take anything heavier than huge doses of ibuprofen, Tylenol, and some codeine. When you’re in pain, you’ll do anything to make the pain go away. I also have newfound empathy for people who deal with chronic pain. This wasn’t chronic, but I now can imagine how debilitating it is for someone dealing with, say, chronic back pain.
3. The fortune of financial security: 99% of people who write about tooth issues on Reddit and elsewhere view their decision matrix primarily through the lens of cost. It’s actually somewhat difficult to find dental content that’s not tightly linked to a cost ROI analysis. I am fortunate to not have to worry about cost and can just optimize for quality of care. This proved especially fortunate when I went to the oral surgeon. It wasn’t until I was strapped in the surgery chair with IVs connected to my arms, heart rate monitor beeping, that an assistant came into the room with a print-out and reviewed the costs and asked if she could take my credit card out of my wallet. I said yes, and she walked over to my wallet on the counter, pulled out my credit card, and walked away. 5 mins later, I was under sedation. Prior to this point, there was no disclosure of how much anything was going to cost.
4. Speaking of financial means, in my research, it was sad to read stories of dental students sharing how they fucked up the mouths and gums of their early patients as they learned on the job — the unlucky patients, I assume, are those without financial means and thus getting their treatment at dental schools.

So: I feel gratitude for it being resolved, empathy for those who have it worse, and tons of optimism over what our AI future will augur for all of us in becoming more informed and savvy consumers of the healthcare system.