The future is the past. For decades now, anesthesia has enjoyed one technological innovation after another to reduce risk ... and arguably reduce the qualifications required of the person sitting in the room. Pulse oximetry, capnography, better ventilators. Some false starts and dead ends (*cough*Bis*cough*) on the safety road, but a clear trajectory toward better and better engineering controls and safer anesthesia. Video laryngoscopes are probably the most recent example of a technology that has turned a critical and difficult technical skill set (DL, fiberoptic intubation) into something less essential to those with lesser training. (Mostly. And "mostly" is apparently "good enough" as long as no one looks too closely at their complications.)
There's no reason to think that machines, monitors, and other tools won't continue to get better and make anesthesia safer and smoother, reducing the skill and knowledge needed.
But that stupid robot will be making ham sandwiches for us before it's intubating patients ...
The technology exists right now for automated CXR interpretation. He should tend his own fires.
Indeed. I think there's more of a future for anesthesiologists ca. 2040 than diagnostic radiologists. And they can't
all do fellowships ...
Machines read ECGs well enough that practically no one ever consults cardiologists for reads. The day is coming when machine interpretations of CXRs, CTs, and MRIs will be good enough too. Long before that day, outsourcing reads to a basement radiology sweatshop full of low-bidder film readers is coming ... whether that basement is located in Nebraska, Europe, Australia, or India hardly matters to the diagnostic radiologist who wants to live in San Francisco. Radiologists seem to universally disagree with this prediction every time I make it
🙂 and they surely know things about the field that I don't. They usually cite liability, licensing requirements, and the medical background to make clinical correlations ... but that argument isn't any different from the ones we've failed to exploit vs CRNAs.
