Your latest hairdryer had 4,000 reviews, but you can’t find any when choosing your surgeon. How does that make sense?

Online rating sites like Yelp, Google and Healthgrades promised to fill that gap. But what do those stars mean? Does a five-star doctor give you better care? And by the way, who's making money every time you leave a review?

We dig into what doctors ratings can and can't tell you, and whether you can use them to pick a doctor. Plus: Rahul looks himself up online and to his surprise finds out he speaks Vietnamese.

Health policy strategist Ezekiel Emanuel, billionaire Vinod Khosla, and two others just published a viral JAMA article claiming autonomous AI will soon replace human doctors. The result—probably due to the prominence of the authors and the prestige of the journal—created a disturbance in the Force of the medical world, and broke the healthcare internet for a couple of weeks. Despite that, we aren’t so sure the quality of the argument justifies the attention or the conclusions.

We break down the article with AI Expert and guest Rachel Lomasky, and give our thoughts on what questions we should really be asking.

Links:

Will Autonomous AI Exceed AI-Aided Physicians as the Best Medical Care? (link from Khosla Ventures web site)

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Clinical Workforce (Dhruv Khullar perspective)

Here we go again – AI vs humans Jonathan’s blog post response

Read more from Rachel Lomasky