AI and Medicine: A Brief History and Where We Are in 2024

(printable PDF) Mike Magee The history of Medicine has always involved a clash between the human need for compassion, understanding, and partnership, and the rigors of scientific discovery and advancing technology. At the interface of these two forces are human societies that struggle to remain forward looking and hopeful while managing complex human relations. The question has […]

Healthy Women Mean a Healthy Democracy.

Mike Magee When he assumed the role on June 13, 2023, Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH focused on inequities in health care as a top priority for his year in office. In a memorable opening that day in Chicago, the Wisconsin anesthesiologist shared a personal mission with 700 AMA delegates centered on his then 4 […]

Does AI Spell The Demise of Relationship Based Health Care?

Mike Magee “What exactly does it mean to augment clinical judgement…?” That’s the question that Stanford Law professor, Michelle Mello, asked in the second paragraph of a May, 2023 article in JAMA exploring the medical legal boundaries of large language model (LLM) generative AI. This cogent question triggered unease among the nation’s academic and clinical […]

“Draining The Sink” On Drug Pricing Will Be Messy Business.

Mike Magee Last week’s New York Times headline said it all: “Drugmakers Are ‘Throwing the Kitchen Sink’ to Halt Medicare Price Negotiations.” It called to mind a story our aging legislators might sooner forget from two decades ago. But how the nation gave away the bank to these corporate characters (which include not only pharma, […]

The Danger to Our Democracy in Moving Nurses and Doctors From The Front Line.

Mike Magee The 4.2 million registered nurses and 1 million doctors in America who are agents of democracy are being sidelined, with a noticeable negative impact on the health of our representative democracy. As such, we must be careful how we select, train, and utilize this resource, and take care to expand rather than diminish […]

The Most Important Builder of the House of Medicine You Never Knew.

Mike Magee Medical History is just not fair. What other conclusion can you draw from the thousands of references and citations featuring Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush and his wild ideas on how to heroically treat Yellow Fever in 1793, but likely never heard of Dr. John Henry Rauch. The former signed the Declaration of Independence […]

Ecology Rescued the AMA and Medical Professionalism Beginning in 1870.

Mike Magee The results of their 1851 survey of 12,400 men from the eight leading U.S. colleges had to be shocking. The AMA was only four years old at the time and being forced to acknowledge a significant lack of public interest in a physician’s services. This in turn had caused the best and the […]

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