>Why can't I just chat with an AI bot and get my prescription?

Because people have decided that whatever drug you are taking shouldn't be taken without a doctor's oversight. If you have a problem with that conclusion, the response should be lobbying to get that drug reclassified as safe for over-the-counter sale, not completely removing the doctor's oversight from the prescription process. Ironically, your proposal here is using AI to treat the symptom that frustrates you without any attempt to diagnose or treat the actual root cause of the problem.

Doctors don't hunt for root causes, in my experience. They do the minimum to bring that specific visit to a pleasant, malpractice-free conclusion.

Doctors oversight should be removed (not as an option, but as a requirement) for 90% of all prescriptions. Unless the drug has externalities like antibiotic resistance, is heinously addictive, or is so difficult to administer correctly that you cant take it outside of a hospital, there's no good reason to tell people what they can't put in their bodies. Whether or not your insurance will pay for it without a prescription is another matter.

This is not an argument that has any relevancy to AI. If anything, someone who believes what you say should be against the introduction of AI into the system because your argument is fundamentally that these drugs shouldn't have a gatekeeper. Swapping out one gatekeeper for another, especially with the new gatekeeper being the unknown black box of some AI middleman, won't actually address your complaint.

It is entirely relevant because removing the bureaucratic gatekeeping of doctors allows people to choose to use AI instead.

> removing the bureaucratic gatekeeping of doctors

And replacing it with the "bureaucratic gatekeeping of" AI?

"choose" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

I think the AI could help. Sure there are a lot of drugs that should be over the counter. Don't know why anyone would abuse ear drops for a kid. But the AI could let you know if there are any dangerous interactions or if your alignment would be helped with this prescription. Besides the AI could spend more time w you than a doctor and answer questions

When it comes to abuse, you already have it with real doctors. Pill mills exist.

Thank the deity of whatever direction you pray in that you are on the happy path and the whole procedure seems frivolous to you. Those people not on the happy path are saved great trouble, as are their families, by having a doctor in the loop.

> Sometimes I just need a prescription. I don't know why I have to drive somewhere, fill out a form, wait, see a nurse, tell them what I wrote on the form, wait some more, see a doctor and tell them what I wrote on the form and have him write me a prescription.

You haven't had to do this for years, unless you need certain controlled substances, and then after the first in-person visit for that, you can make remote follow up appointments.

I can see room for an argument for liberalizing what’s available over the counter (and, I guess we’ll have to work out something with insurance in that case..). But the whole point of the prescription system is that some medicines need doctor consultation before you use them. Working around that with AI seems quite silly.

Doesn't teledoc already solve this? We use it for your exact scenario and reasons. No Ai needed.

Eh.

My 3 1/2 year old daughter woke up from a nap on a weekend after just recovering from a cold, screaming while grasping her ear, telling us how much it hurt. I looked in it with an otoscope and confirmed it was super red. I figured they wouldn't be able to send a prescription but my wife tried it anyways - and sure enough, the telemedicine option was no good. One very rushed trip 30 minutes into town into urgent care before they closed to have a nurse practitioner look in her ear and confirm what we absolutely, already knew and we finally had our prescription - and $200 less in our bank account.

> fill out a form, wait, see a nurse, tell them what I wrote on the form, wait some more, see a doctor and tell them what I wrote on the form

lol, the entire computer industry is based on me entering my email address twice in a row...

> Why can't I just chat with an AI bot and get my prescription?

You don't understand why the person who dispenses dangerous drugs to the public needs to be a licensed professional and not a chatbot who called me a genius earlier today when I said I want to code up a script to pull some data from an endpoint and decode the data so it's human readable?

Very few prescription drugs are dangerous. Of those few that are, almost none of them are more dangerous than alcohol or cigarettes, and boy are the people who dispense those to the public not licensed professionals.

So because liquor store clerks aren't professionals we should let Eliza Chatbot 2.0 dispense any prescription drug to anyone? Wild thinking

No. We shouldn't even require Eliza Chatbot 2.0 unless they're more dangerous than alcohol or cigarettes. Just an ID check by the clerk at CVS will do.