Doctors, A.I. and Empathy for Patients

To the Editor:

Re “ChatGPT’s Bedside Manner Is Better Than Mine,” by Jonathan Reisman (Opinion guest essay, Oct. 9):

Dr. Reisman notes that ChatGPT’s answers to patient questions have been rated as more empathetic than those written by actual doctors. This should not be a call for doctors to surrender our human role to A.I. To the contrary, we need to continue to improve our communication skills.

For the past 25 years, I have been facilitating seminars in doctor-patient communication. The skills to communicate bad news listed by Dr. Reisman are exactly the techniques that we suggest to our medical students. However, doctors can avoid the temptation to surrender their “humanity to a script” as if it were “just another day at work.”

Techniques are a valuable guide, but the real work consists of carefully listening to the responses and their emotional content, and crafting new words and phrases that speak to the unique patient’s confusion, fear and distress.

In my experience, patients know when we are reciting a script, and when we are paying attention to their thoughts and feelings. Unlike A.I., and especially when conversations are matters of life and death, we can reach into the depths of our humanity to feel and communicate empathy and compassion toward our patients.

Neil S. Prose
Durham, N.C.

To the Editor:

Mention the words “A.I.” and “doctoring” to most physicians in the same sentence, and the immediate reaction is often skepticism or fear.

As Dr. Jonathan Reisman noted in his essay, A.I. has shown a remarkable ability to mimic human empathy in encounters with patients. This is one reason many practicing physicians worry that A.I. may replace doctors eventually.