March 4, 2026 Forum

Jeremy

A world-renowned expert on homo sapiens is Yuval Noah Harari. I suspect most of you are familiar with him. He wrote the book, Sapiens, and most recently a book, Nexus. Well, he’s repeatedly stated in public and in his writings that he predicts the first profession to fall from AI will be family doctors, because what we do in his view is so triaging and superficial. His understanding of family medicine is itself quite superficial, which is interesting for such a thoughtful, deep thinker. I have a great deal of respect for his writing. And I even contacted him by email and his staff said, “you know he’s not sure about family medicine and AI”. I said, well, I can see radiology being replaced by AI very quickly, but not family medicine. You’re talking about the most human complex relationship-oriented profession. However, this just tells me that the public awareness of what we do is still so thin.

Jack

Jeremy, that’s a selective lack of knowledge. Yohan Harari has not been to a family doctor. That’s my guess. And so he’s thinking, well, what a family doctor, what is their job? It’s to triage diagnoses, because the only exposure he has is through what the New York Times writer, Lisa Sanders. She’s the medical person who writes the medical mysteries. And, you know, the first paragraph is always this person saw their family doctor and couldn’t get anywhere. And, you know, it took two years for the diagnosis to be made. And so his exposure is to the negative side of family medicine. I think a lot of people are in his shoes.

Those in the middle to upper middle class never go to a primary care doc. Their bones hurt, so they go to an orthopedist. Their belly hurts, so they go to a gastroenterologist. They’ve never had exposure to an actual primary care physician. And so their construct is based on the New York Times medical mysteries, where primary care should be using AI to make this diagnosis, by gosh. And they have reduced medicine to symptom, diagnosis, treatment. And then it’s a one-to-one relationship through that whole way. And that if you can, if you have a symptom, you can make a diagnosis and a diagnosis, there’s a treatment for it. And it’s pathetic. It’s sad, actually.

And I don’t blame us. I blame them. Because I can tell you, of the 2000 people in Yuma, who go to their family doctor, 1500 of them would not think anything like that. They would think: “my family doctor can use the computer to get my diagnosis. But by God, I want my family doctor there when my mom dies.”

Bill G

You articulate that, but it doesn’t comport with what most family doctors are doing.

We are very much behind in the way we purport family medicine as doing something useful, when we’re not, in fact, doing much that is useful.