Utah to let AI examine patients and prescribe medication without human oversight

And the medications that are controlled vs uncontrolled (at least here in Texas) seem completely random.

So are we just admitting that the "AI" here is the equivalent of a dialog box and this same change could have been enacted at any point in the last half century?

>We don't really need LLMs for that, but if it's a catalyst for liberalization, fine.

Is this liberalization or is it just further entrenching the bureaucracy that this change implies is already broken?

This whole thing just feels like a Chesterton's fence scenario in which we knock down the fence and then immediately rebuild it, only a few inches shorter and with weaker materials this time. I just don't see how that's any sort of victory for progress.

It sounds like a catalyst for more red tape, more creepy Internet tracking, higher drug costs and more impossible to break subscriptions, all to help some health care companies' bottom lines. I don't consider this fine.

My hour long yearly physical takes 15 minutes and my miscellaneous questions get brushed off. I have some sort of eczema on my hand and he told me to use lotion. After telling him I do, he said to keep doing it. It had been six months then and now 18 months. Problem is still there.

Just today I finally found a dermatologist. Soonest appointment I could get from the ones I called is May of 2027.

At a certain point, I hope LLMs can provide at least basic medical help reliably because I can't get the opportunity to ask a doctor to begin with.

Drugged with a topical ointment and complacent by having less acne? This is a one-year trial for patients with mild-to-moderate acne. Let's not blow this situation out of proportion. This trial seems rather narrowly scoped and overall a positive idea for well understood treatments that hardly need an MD to begin with.

If you want to get into conspiracy theories of a government wanting a drugged and compliant citizenry just look no further than the sudden push legalizing THC across the country.

    You could always have a CI sort of thing for doctors prescriptions where you run the prescription through AI and it can flag any potential error to the doctor.

> What positive value does the AI actually add that isn't circumventing a legal requirement that we decided to put in place?

You only reply with stuff nobody said. Which explains why you "see those fallacies repeated" every time, if you bring them up. A simple solution is to stick things actually are saying.

At this point the term "AI" has been so diluted that it doesn't refer to generative image models or LLMs or traditional machine learning so much as it acts as a memetic sonic screwdriver, i.e. whatever journalists, pundits, founders, etc. need it to be. You can see how each party is wielding it in this specific instance quite clearly.

Examples of its incompetence:

- It's been 3 years since the government itself concluded that Phenylephrine is not effective at all. Look at the shelf. Want to spend $20 on Sudafed PE? Go for it! FDA isn't going to stop it from being sold even specifically advertised to treat an illness. They don't mind everyone wasting their money on a fraudulently-advertised medicine and subjecting themselves to any side-effects, for nothing. Of course, our government created this farce in the first place through their ham-fisted attempts to combat meth, and while illicit drug manufacturers have long since worked around this, we still have to wait in a line and show ID to buy a single box of the actually-effective drug.

- It took over 25 years for them to approve new sunscreen active ingredients. They've had many more options than we do in Europe and Asia. Why does this matter? Because our shitty sunscreen sucks, people are less likely to use it. Therefore more skin cancer. The damage is lasting, too. Most people who decided years ago they hate the oily crap that stings their eyes aren't checking the shelves every day, so when the new stuff finally comes to market, many won't even know, and will just carry on in their habit of skipping it.

- The tens-of-billions of dollars a year industry hawking ineffective and sometimes unsafe supplements, advertised in slightly oblique promises, with a fine print "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease." The whole FDA, constructed supposedly to protect us from quackery, simply disappears when you print that incantation on your advertising in 4-point font.

- And of course, countless cases where people who are terminally ill anyway find experimental treatments painfully hard to get here compared to other Western countries.

Your hyperbolic comments about The Jungle and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire have zero to do with whether I should be able to buy acne cream without speaking to a human doctor. Nobody said "Don't regulate anything." I said our regulation is done poorly because of how rigid and one-size-fits-all it is. If "humanity" knows better, then maybe take a look at how no other first-world country is as bad at this as we are.

Sometimes doctors make choices that reflect a landscape of risk the patient is no more prepared to understand than the doctor is ready to run a network test. People who say they “know they need something” are often confidently wrong.

But there are. Costs and wait times go down. Can be handled like a drive-through. No mis-diagnoses due to fatigue, etc.

Great. Perhaps this will motivate the exploration of them. The prevailing racket is in desperate need of disruption.

Same for percentages of strength in medicine. If a certain percentage strength of tretinoin does not work, you need to get a new prescription for the stronger one.

Another thing are different providers. If you get care at one provider they won't have the data of the other providers necessarily.

---

None of these things are insurmountable and would just require some good software to fix(connect databases, make hierarchies of medicine, etc) However it's in no-ones incentive to do so.

The doctors, nurses and other medical staff have 0 interest in:

1) making themselves obsolete

2) learn new software systems

3) change their workflow

And will not only express this, but also actively misuse the new tools that they are given (happened in my country) to make a point of how things can't be trusted and why they are necessary.

In order to solve this you need something like the solution proposed coming in from the outside. This way the current medical staff have 0 control and have to change/adapt.

  I notice acne.
  I have a choice of going to a regular doc, or this ai clinic.
  I decide to go to ai clinic (and take the risk of prescription that may be incorrect).
  I get the prescription. Probably double check it with Gemini or chatgpt.
  I get the medicine and use it.

That's a pretty thin defense when things do go wrong.

big /s