Artificial Intelligence as the Future Savior of Medicine: Saving Lives and Overcoming Human Errors
In modern healthcare, human errors contribute to the loss of millions of lives and compromise health every year.
However, artificial intelligence (AI) offers a promising solution to significantly reduce diagnostic and treatment mistakes.
According to recent studies, AI now demonstrates capabilities surpassing human doctors in diagnosing complex and rare diseases, as well as expanding access to healthcare services for the most vulnerable populations.
Health researcher Charlotte Blize, in her new book ‘Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us – and How AI Could Save Lives,’ emphasizes that today’s medical professionals are under constant pressure due to overloaded schedules, limited resources, and high responsibility, which can affect diagnostic accuracy.
Statistics show that in the UK, about 5% of primary care visits result in incorrect diagnosis, while in the US, such errors lead to death or severe injury for approximately 800,000 people annually.
Patients with rare diseases face even greater challenges, as accurate diagnosis is often elusive.
Moreover, experts highlight that physicians struggle to keep up with the explosion of medical knowledge: over 7,000 rare diseases are identified each year, and around 250 new biomedical articles are published every day.
Just keeping up with research abstracts would require working over 22 hours a day.
This is where AI systems can help — continuously analyzing vast data sets, detecting patterns, and making reliable conclusions, thus reducing human error and improving diagnostic precision.
Recent 2023 research shows that ChatGPT-4 outperforms doctors in diagnosing rare diseases, correctly identifying up to 90% of such conditions within eight attempts.
Real patient stories further illustrate AI’s potential: for example, little Alex, who endured three years and consultations with 17 doctors without receiving a definitive diagnosis.
When his mother entered his symptoms into ChatGPT, it suggested tethered spinal cord syndrome, which was later confirmed by medical professionals, leading to proper treatment.
Beyond diagnosis, AI can also address healthcare accessibility issues.
Vulnerable groups—those with low income, disabilities, or living in remote areas—often fall through the cracks of traditional medicine.
In the UK, initiatives are underway to enable patients to consult AI-powered applications like the NHS app for quick, practical advice.
Nevertheless, challenges remain: over 2.5 billion people worldwide still lack internet access, and many in developed countries have limited digital skills.
Researchers caution that current debates around medical AI tend to emphasize risks and errors.
However, a fair assessment must also consider deficiencies in existing health systems — often inaccessible, slow, or unreliable.
The high costs associated with deploying advanced AI models also pose barriers for startups and smaller clinics, as increasingly complex algorithms require significant computational resources.
Despite these hurdles, the potential of AI to revolutionize medicine remains immense: by analyzing data more accurately, reducing errors, and making healthcare more accessible, AI could herald a new era of medicine that saves more lives than ever before.