Strange Bedfellows. The Unlikely Alliance between Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Medicine

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the brink of revolutionizing medicine. New tools for dealing with medical data, based on deep learning and state-of-the-art data mining methods, have the potential to change medical practice significantly. The opportunities of AI for biomedical research as well as clinical practice are hotly debated. But there is one aspect that has been overlooked so far. Since AI-applications may deal with the time-consuming tasks of collecting and processing data, physicians could spend more time with their patients. This could be an opportunity to implement the principles of a more person-centered medicine, that advocates of narrative medicine have demanded for decades. At first glance, AI and narrative medicine are strange bedfellows, but I aim to show that this unlikely alliance might lead to a larger view of the medical profession, as outlined by the renowned physician Francis H. Peabody almost a century ago. This larger view implies that the very nature of medical practice is not the treatment of disease, but the care of the patient. And AI might just be the right tool to make this ideal a reality.