Weekend Longform: AI physicians, screwworms and fertility treatment
September 27, 2025
A. If AI can diagnose patients, what are doctors for?
Druv Khullar, an internist in New York, reports in the New Yorker on a competition in Boston between an agentic AI agent and a skilled clinician to come up with the right diagnosis in a mystery case. The AI agent does quite well, and the skilled clinician pointed out that he had prepared for weeks, and the AI agent had taken merely six minutes. The results are not always so good. A chatbot suggested that one user concerned about salt in the diet ingest potentially lethal quantities of bromium. Khullar begins the story with a 33 year old software with with severe food intolerance after colon surgery. A large language model helped him diagnose this after his concerns were dismissed by physicians. But when Khullar presented his symptoms to a large language model in a less systematic way, it came up with wildly wrong answers, and even hallucinated laboratory and imaging tests.
Here’s a link to a post from earlier this month on what it means when AI “beats” physicians at solving mystery diagnosis cases.
B. The screwworms are coming
Beef prices are up in the US because imports of livestock from Mexico are restricted because of the spread of screwworm. The first case of a human infected with screwworm has already been reported. Here’s a link to a Bloomberg article which describes the screwworm as “a “flying piranha” that eats its host from the inside out, the screwworm is capable of killing a full-grown steer in just 10 days.” The screwworm was eliminated from the US and Central America down to Panama by release of sterile male screwworm flies - but as the risk receded the government program to release these sterile males was abandoned. Now they are back.
C. The perils of fertility treatment
Fertility treatment has improved dramatically over the last few decades, and US fertility clinics report regularly on their success rates. However, reporting on errors is not standardized. Here’s a link to a podcast from Bloomberg which reports on terrible care received by some women at a fertility chain.
Hope you have a great weekend.
Here’s an animal photo to (hopefully) make you smile - utterly unrelated to the articles above.
Snapping turtle covering the eggs she just laid (Carlisle, MA, Spring 2020
