The Incidental Patient Conundrum

**Brian** (0:02)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to another Saturday Conundrum. I'm Brian, one of the co-hosts of The Daily AI Show. I'm really happy you guys are here. I feel like we have a good one here. This one's called the Incidental Patient Conundrum. And it actually came out of the same show idea, the Conundrum came out of the same show that last week's Conundrum came out of, which never happens on the live show, but me, Andy and Beth were all having a great conversation, and there was like back to back ideas. So we do a lot of health ones when it comes to Conundrum. We go back to the episodes. I felt this one was unique and different enough that I wanted to bring it to you guys today. And I really love this idea of this Conundrum, which is the idea that we're all increasingly getting more and more and more data. I mean, recently I bought an Auror ring, right? So I have this ring on my finger now that's tracking health data. And there's a lot of positives that I feel come from that, from being able to track my HRV to sleep quality, to all sorts of stuff that I think are valuable in my life.
However, in the future, we might have AI scans that are able to do full assessments of our entire body and bring back all the information. Now, on the one side, as you're going to see here in the intro, this could be great because, hey, who wouldn't want to help protect their own life or a loved one's life by having an early detection, an early treatment plan, and making sure that a diseased state like cancer doesn't take somebody's life? I don't think anybody listening to this is going to argue with that idea. AI is going to save more lives in the future. I believe that wholeheartedly. I mean, that's my take, but I believe it wholeheartedly. But there is another side to this, and that's the part of the conundrum, right? Because with that data, some problems of one of those problems is that you may not want a full AI body scan out there as your official record if something like a life insurance policy is able to look at that, sees that there's something that's maybe not really a problem, but it came up. It's something you could live with for the rest of your life. But it comes up on the report. All of a sudden, they're denying you a life insurance policy or they're charging you more.
Another option, another problem.
Knowing that you have all these maybe inconsequential diagnoses that aren't going to really affect your life, doesn't mean it doesn't affect your life. There's a whole mental toll that comes to it. So, you know, we're human. So we're going to dwell in a lot of ways on the idea that maybe we have some some small abnormalities or issues with our body that if you never knew they existed would never affect you. But now that you do, what do you do with that information? How does it affect the rest of your life?
Do you actually live as if you had some sort of ailment?
We know the term hyperchondria, right? And that's what we're sort of talking about here is like, is it good to have all that data? Number one, you have it on like the health insurance side and what that could do, but also just knowing that information could be problematic. Also, there's some early reports and research studies where things had been identified earlier, treatments had been done and the death toll rate didn't change.
Meaning that these were probably things people that had surgeries for things that weren't actually going to affect their quality of life had certainly not caused death, at least by the numbers. So now you have all these people having like extra surgeries or at least extra treatments that maybe they should have never needed or had, but AI surfaced it and now people are nervous and they want to do something about it. Okay, so you kind of get the idea here. There's two sides of this. AI is going to save lives. AI is also going to cause some issues because that track record of knowing what's going on in your body, whether that's you take a pill and the AI is able to, you know, check your cells and whatever it is. I mean, I'm sure there'll be some future Star Trek-ish type tech here that we're going to have here in the next couple of years. But is that a good thing? Is that a great thing? I don't know. There's two sides to this and it's hard to find a middle gram here that makes a whole lot of sense.