Brook Cheng

May 27, 2025

The healthcare today is akin to voodoo rather than data-driven, thus 80% of doctors will be replaced by AI. Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla, the Sun Microsystems co-founder, made this remarks in his keynote speech at the Health Innovation Summit held in San Francisco in 2012 (Liat Clark, 2012).

Intriguing Remarks, Valid Criticism

The remarks are intriguing for investors and general consumer public, but could be irritating to healthcare professionals. Davis Liu, MD, an American primary care doctor, was among the audience. Shortly after the summit, he wrote in www.thehealthcareblog.com (Davis Liu, 2012), saying he was inspired to hear from all those speakers, particularly listen to Kholsa, and he considered “Kholsa’s criticism of the health care system is completely valid”.

Put 3000 Treatments on The Test

In 2013, the British Medical Journal posted on their website (Clinical Evidence) the results of an analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) focusing on harms and benefits of 3,000 medical treatments (Frakt A, 2013).

The effectiveness of each treatment rated on six criteria are as below:

• Beneficial: 11%

• likely to be beneficial: 23%

• trade-offs between benefits and harms: 7%

• unlikely to be beneficial: 6%

• likely to be ineffective or harmful: 3%

• Effectiveness unknown: 50%

The key findings of the analysis:

Merely 11% of 3000 treatments have evidence-proved benefits with certainty.

The benefits of half of 3000 treatments are unknown (in other words, we just go ahead to try them on the patients).

The remaining 39% are clinically no more beneficial, or less harmful, than placebo (you can consider the words “likely”, “probably”, “seems”, or “appear to be”... used in RCTs is equal to the word “useless”).

In summary of what we clinicians may feel: Pride on the thousands of therapeutic modalities we are able to offer to the patients, shameful on 89% of our offers useless or likely useless.

Medicine Back to 1979

"Medicine's treatments for diseases are seldom effective, and that they are often more dangerous than the diseases they're designed to treat." – Robert Mendelsohn, MD, in his "Confession of a Medical Heretic" (1979).

45 Years Later in 2020

"Medicine has yet to come up with a more useful drug than morphine; without it, few would have the heart to practise the profession." – Seamus O'Mahony, MD (2020) in his book “Can medicine be cured”.

Can We change the Game?

The answer is everyone of us can help change the game, if only by doing one thing first. What and How?

Smash open your echo chambers or closed bubbles, open your perspectives. Deep thinking, questioning, and do not blindly believing anything including this post your are reading.

References

Davis Liu, MD, Vinod Khosla: Technology Will Replace 80 Percent of Docs, Aug 31, 2012. https://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2012/08/31/vinod-khosla-technology-will-replace-80-percent-of-docs

Liat Clark, Vinod Khosla: Machines will replace 80 percent of doctors. 04.09.2012, https://www.wired.co.uk/article

#effectivenessoftreatments #medicine #conventionalmedicine #evidencebased #skepticism #criticalthinking #echochambers