Are Doctors IRRELEVANT? AI Can Diagnose Better Than Humans | Dr. Pradeep Albert

Many medical subspecialties will be completely changed or replaced. One of the first specialties that's going to be changed mostly by artificial intelligence is actually going to be orthopedics and musculoskeletal injuries. 50% of people will not make it to 76 or 78. Older parents make less viable offspring. If you add red light to stem cells they produce different things, certain cells, they actually cause the stem cells to release different things. Exosomes are the greatest anti inflammatory I've ever seen. As physicians we risk the danger of becoming irrelevant.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. We're going to talk about something that is just part and parcel to my quest for longevity. And it's regenerating tissues actually growing, well health and growing, maybe even new body parts. Our guest today is Dr. Pradeep Alpert who is an expert in stem cells and PRP and very specifically medical imaging and using AI to do what he used to do as a radiologist. And he's done 40,000 or so procedures which means he's got a lot of experience to share with us. So we're going to go deep on the implications of AI for longevity. And I don't think you can do this living to at least 180 or not dying from the four most common causes of disease without some help from knowing what's going on in there. Sometimes it's lab work, sometimes it's observation and sometimes it's imaging. You need all of it. And we're not going to get there without AI because the best people in the world, we're doubling our knowledge of biology every 13 months for all biology and the amount for humans is likely faster than that. In fact I've seen numbers up to every 72 days. So you can't be awake long enough to read everything. So we need a system and we have the system now and we've got a guy who's using it. So welcome to the show.

Thank you very much Dave. It was, it's a pleasure to be here and fascinating material as always and I'm not only happy to be here as a guest, I'm a big fan.

So what do you see happening with AI? Because if I'm at home and I can take whatever data I have about myself and I can run it through an AI system, do I need a doctor as much anymore?

What's happened is, is that over the past, you know, I would even say the past year or two, you know, with the advent of all the Different AI tools and, you know, language learning models that are out there. We noticed that there's been an incredible amount of information that's kind of democratized to the general public. Some of it, most of it's very accurate, frankly, some of it is incorrect. But the interesting part is that I think healthcare from a fundamental point of view is gonna change. And it's going to change very, very quickly. And I think if, you know, physicians in the United States are going to wait for the FDA or things like that to prove it, that's not going to happen. I think these things are going to come online from places all over the world, and patients are just going to enter the information like you just said, and they're going to be able to get that data back. And then they're going to go back to their physicians or their healthcare providers and say, hey, you were wrong or you were what? Why did you do this? So it's going to be an interesting next couple of years.

I've seen a transition from, you know, my parents generation where you have the, the white lab coat up on an altar and whatever the doctor says you have to do. It is kind of a paternalistic view now where some doctors from a couple generations ago say, well, I know the patient's terminal, but I'm not going to tell them because it'll just stress them out. I'm like, whoa. To me, that feels kind of shocking. But the shift now it seems like doctors, at least the functional medicine, the longevity doctors, the regenerative doctors, they're like your partners and your coaches, and they're helping you think about things in a way that maybe AI doesn't yet. So does your doctor know a coach and a partner less than a dictator?

Well, yeah. Well, so the entire, you know, just in my career as a doctor, I mean, you know, when I first started, doctors were up on a pedestal and now, you know, we were in, during the pandemic, you know, we were kind of controversially discarded or brought back, depending on whatever, you know, you believe. But what's, what's fascinating about what's happening in, in healthcare is, is that for patients, patients need to be able to understand how things are. Like, like if, if, if you can get information, the same information from your doctor as, as well as from your AI, if the doctor doesn't communicate why something is and personalize it to you, then it doesn't matter. Right? So I think that that person, the personalization of medicine, which AI can help gather the data for, but to explain it to you and kind of look at things for you is what the role of the physician will be. But frankly speaking, I think that many medical subspecialties will be completely changed and replaced. I know for a fact when you look at images, right, there's machines can do them faster, better, more accurately, far more important, far faster than I can ever do it personally.

Elon Musk is famous for saying, if you look at the deaths per mile driven from fully automated cars, that it's much less than the deaths per miles driven by humans because of the same reason you talked about is radiology or medical imaging at the point where technology is better at spotting problems than the average radiologist.

I think we're there for certain things, not for everything. Right? So just like your whole. So one of the problems with medical imaging is that the way that the images are acquired, they're taken in different ways. And there's no, you know, there is some standardization and there's different patterns that people do all over the world. So I would say, you know, they talk about, you know, there'll be a turning point or a flipping point, probably, I would say within the next two years. I think that's going to happen. Now, it's interesting that you bring up drivers of those cars, right? So as a radiologist, what people talk about is that they think that people like me will get replaced first. What was fascinating is during COVID when we had a significant decrease in the amount of accidents. You know, what happened at that time was as insurance companies, you know, when the initial part of the lockdown had to start giving back money, they weren't giving it back because they were good people by law. They had to use a certain amount of their. Of their premium for actual accidents. So now they didn't know what to do because nobody was driving around. Okay, so what happened was, is that there was a significant decrease in the amount of accidents. And I believe that one of the first specialties that's going to be changed mostly by artificial intelligence is not imaging, because that's the one everybody else thinks about. As commonly, there's actually going to be orthopedics and musculoskeletal injuries because the amount of accidents have decreased. The second thing that's also happened is, is that the amount of organ transportation during that time diminish so much because we get most of our organs from young accident victims.

Oh, wow.

So, you know, things that you never would think about. So the unintended consequences of artificial intelligence are really, you know, are fascinating to talk about. It's not people are thinking it's going to be, you know, a replacement one for one. That's not the way it works.

Some people are, are bothered by this. Like one of the things pt, after you have some injection in your shoulder or surgery, you need physical therapy and recovery and functional movement. And one of the pieces of tech at Upgrade labs is an AI driven functional movement exercise piece of equipment called Oxfit. And it's all driven by AI and it watches how you move, it measures how you move and it changes it based on your physiology, much like a functional trainer would. So you could say some functional trainers are going, oh my gosh, you know, that's evil. I don't think people are that motivated by technology. We're much more motivated by people. So the role of medical experts doesn't look like it's going to go away, but looking at, you know, 500 radiological films per day with your amazingly trained pattern matching system, it seems like working in a coal mine cognitively, it might take some of the drudgery out of it.

Yeah, absolutely. So there's nothing worse than looking, doing the, I mean, no matter what profession you're in, right. If you do the same thing every single day and you know, ideally, hopefully people that go into the specialty like, you know, I'm in, you know, you have to be somewhat intelligent to do it. But you take someone intelligent and you, you, you're making them do rote work again and again and again. So interestingly enough, I think it frees up intellect to be able to do other things. So I hope we're not constrained just based on, you know, our profession. But, you know, it's, it's up to us to kind of retrain ourselves and kind of look for other things in the same field. Frankly, you don't have to look for things outside of your field. But I think it's going to be very interesting. I think that there are people that are survivors, they'll do whatever it takes to keep going. And there are other people that just like mentally check in no matter what profession you're in. So I'm kind of excited by all the stuff.