{"id":39995,"date":"2011-07-11T08:03:05","date_gmt":"2011-07-11T12:03:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=39995"},"modified":"2012-02-29T14:41:54","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T19:41:54","slug":"paging-dr-watson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2011\/07\/paging-dr-watson\/","title":{"rendered":"Paging Dr. Watson"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Jeremy<\/a>
Jeremy Teitelbaum.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Unfortunately, a supercomputer won\u2019t drive you to the clinic for a checkup.<\/h3>\n

By Jeremy Teitelbaum, Dean<\/a>
\nCollege of Liberal Arts and Sciences<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week I visited Watson<\/a>,<\/a> the IBM Jeopardy!-champion supercomputer that I\u2019ve written about before<\/a>, at IBM\u2019s research facility<\/a> in Yorktown Heights, NY. The day was spent in the very auditorium where Watson defeated Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the momentous Jeopardy! challenge, listening to a series of presentations about the design of Watson and its potential applications. One of the most eloquent presenters was Dr. Herbert Chase<\/a> of Columbia School of Medicine, who talked about how Watson could help doctors<\/a> deal with the nearly impossible task of mastering the enormous body of knowledge available to them and then applying that information in clinical practice.<\/p>\n

As I listened to Dr. Chase\u2019s excitement about the power of Watson-assisted diagnosis, my Watson mania began to fade, and I started to have a sinking feeling. Dr. Chase\u2019s ideas sounded extremely cool \u2013 he is working with IBM to develop a sophisticated \u201cexpert system<\/a>\u201d based on Watson technology. Although expert systems have been in use in medicine for years, they have lacked the ability to process unstructured data like academic papers, patient histories, and clinical notes. Watson technology would make them more powerful and self-updating. With Watson\u2019s help, doctors could minimize their own biases in diagnosis and could avoid mistakes in prescribing. Sounds pretty amazing, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

\"<p>CLAS<\/a>It is amazing, but it\u2019s also an old story. Once again, someone is proposing that a brand-new piece of sophisticated technology is going to be the solution to an age-old human problem. Sitting in that auditorium and listening to Dr. Chase\u2019s excitement, I suddenly foresaw a future in which competing computer companies would advertise their web-based diagnostic assistants on TV, and people who didn\u2019t feel well would show up at the doctor\u2019s office with a printout from one of those sites explaining what\u2019s wrong with them. I saw every clinical practice in the country buying supercomputer time so they could advertise \u201cstate-of-the-art computer-assisted diagnosis.\u201d Pediatric call-in hours, where you once spoke to a doctor, and now speak to a medical assistant, will connect you to a website \u2013 or, even worse, to a phone system that sounds like the United Airlines reservation robot.<\/p>\n

Now maybe these changes will, in fact, provide better care. It\u2019s possible \u2013 medical diagnosis is notoriously unreliable and treatments are often wrong. But I don\u2019t see how Watson technology can address the core problems of health in this country, because I don\u2019t see how it will get people proper pre-natal care, or vaccinate their children, or convince them to exercise and eat a healthy diet, or talk them into getting their colonoscopy when they turn 50. Nor do I see how it will help them pay for those basic services. These seem to be truly intractable problems, even harder than computer-based natural language recognition. Indeed, here in Connecticut, the public employee unions just voted against a deal with the state over benefits in part because it would have given them a health insurance discount if they followed guidelines for preventive care!<\/p>\n

Every dollar spent on high-tech is a dollar not going into front-line public health. We are fascinated with diagnosing and treating illness, when so many of our problems \u2013 asthma, heart disease, diabetes, orthopedic problems derived from obesity \u2013 are rooted in behavior, income inequality, and environmental factors, and just don\u2019t seem amenable to the classic diagnosis-treatment model of medical practice.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m enthusiastic about Watson as a game-show winner, and I suspect the underlying technology will spread throughout our lives quickly and pervasively. But, unfortunately, I don\u2019t think it will make us healthier. The biggest problem with our medical care, you see, is not in our algorithms, but in ourselves.<\/p>\n

Comments? Send them to: dean@clas.uconn.edu<\/a><\/p>\n

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has 23 departments in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, ranging from physics to philosophy, and more than 15,000 students, 600 faculty, and 83,000 alumni. Learn more about our three initiatives, Health and Human Behavior, the Environment, and <\/em>Culture and Society on the CLAS website<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Other CLAS Blog posts:<\/h4>\n

On Not Buying an iPad<\/a><\/p>\n

A Step Closer to Science Fiction?<\/a><\/p>\n

Academic Freedom Meets Freedom of Information<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>A Civil Conversation on Contentious Issues<\/a><\/p>\n

Academically Anchored<\/a><\/p>\n

Meditations on A(nother) Snow Day<\/a><\/p>\n

Coming to Grips with Climate Change<\/a><\/p>\n

Ideas \u2013 The Psychological Currency of the University<\/a><\/p>\n

‘Just Hire the Best’?<\/a><\/p>\n

Will ‘Crowdsourcing’ Revolutionize Scholarship?<\/a><\/p>\n

Hidden Symmetries<\/a><\/p>\n

Spectacular Storrs<\/a><\/p>\n

Citizenship, Marriage, and Mosques: Problems in the Applied Humanities<\/a><\/p>\n

Of Deans and English Professors<\/a><\/p>\n

The Joys of Jamming<\/a><\/p>\n

Slick Calculations<\/a><\/p>\n

The Road to Agra<\/a><\/p>\n

UConn Over Yale and Other Tales from Jim Draper \u201941<\/a><\/p>\n

The Amazon, Avatar, and Smallpox<\/a><\/p>\n

The Value of Curiosity<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unfortunately, a supercomputer won\u2019t drive you to the clinic for a checkup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[66],"class_list":["post-39995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-11 03:59:46","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39995"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55732,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39995\/revisions\/55732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39995"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=39995"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=39995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}