'DeepSeek is humane. Doctors are more like machines': my mother's worrying reliance on AI for health advice

[snot]

2. Please excuse if this is a tangent, but

I was thinking just recently of how far my experiences with health care in the US have deteriorated since maybe 20 years ago. In the old days, the best doctors seemed to genuinely care about understanding your disorder and effectively addressing it. Now, even though I'm referred to some of the "best" doctors, I feel like they're just going through the motions, completely incurious about any aspects that might be relevant but aren't on some checklist... it's almost as if they were preparing us for their own replacement by AI's.

It also seems to take MUCH longer to get in to see a doctor now (I've had to wait as long as 4 months, even in a major metropolitan area), which of course leaves more time for one's condition to worsen and become more complicated. Has the number of docs per capita declined that much?

Docs also seem more specialized. What I used to get done through one specialist now takes two or three; and you have to get a referral from #1 to even make and appointment with #2, and so on – often further delaying any actual solution to the problem.

It all seems FAR less efficient than it used to be; and I'd think the work is far less interesting for the docs. I think some of these trends are probably driven by our corporate health care & insurance system in the US.