YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr Charlotte Blease

lines on the record: 34
first: 2025-09-05
most recent: 2025-09-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think so too. Having the courage to recognise innovation, I would add to that too, the medical history does unfortunately, we get into why, but it has a history of postponing progress. So anesthesia, antiseptics, penicillin, hand washing, clinical trials, all of these things were resisted in their day. And we've got to take the opportunities and see innovation if it can ultimately help patients. And so that inherent conservatism, which I think is very, again, understandable, again, for psychological reasons in medicine, we should have the courage to challenge that. And because I sort of come from this outsider perspective, hopefully that gave me opportunities to do that a little better than maybe even a medical doctor.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is we can do to use these technologies in our service, the ways that benefit more people. And that's going to be a very demanding conversation.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I would say a key question is, what is the problem to which AI is the solution? And we've got to be really specific about that, asking what those specific problems may be. I focus on human psychology. So I want to say we shouldn't always assume that the way human expertise does things is necessarily the best way. So we should expect to do things differently if we want to raise the bar. And I would want to situate it just in the discussion we've had. There are many very good arguments for AI. There's huge amounts of opportunities, but there are also risks. So I would say sort of related to that, we perhaps have to move away from the idea that AI is going to represent a certain utopia or an utter dystopia. And we've got to have a richer discussion in that middle ground about what”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't even talk about the dog about potential are not working for us in the ways that they ought to. And we need a serious conversation, as I said, a civic level, but also about our legal structures and whether they have enough bite to monitor and effectively police big tech.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are sensitive health information. In the States about one in three people have had their health data leaked in some sense violated. That's a massive problem. And the NHS, I don't know if you recall the Synovas, which is one of the worst cyber attacks of its time, which hit the NHS. Sinovis did blood testing 300 million patients, blood test results, but also their sensitive data was attacked, linked onto the dark web. So we've got all kinds of ongoing issues associated with, say, privacy, but also the accuracy of these tools who's benefiting, what kind of a society we want to live in. So there are potential benefits for sure, but there's many potential ways in which these tools are already”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Yes, there are huge concerns here with regulation, with accountability. There are many things that could go wrong, which is why I'm glad we're having these conversation, more of them. We need more of them at a civic level. People need guidance with respect to these tools. There are so many issues here. I mean, we've talked on one of them could be the reliability of these tools, again, for certain populations. Does that drive disparities in healthcare? What does it do to equity? Who gets to use these tools? Who is going to be our healthcare provider in the future? Is it going to be Amazon or Google? How do we feel about that? What do they do with our data? Who's profiteering from this? What does it do to privacy? Is privacy gone now and is it about exploitation of our...”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of all their problems. So the data that these tools are trained on, how they're designed, how they're tested for different populations and whether their reliability is 85% of the papers looked at the harms. That's important. But there's also opportunities here. And we shouldn't overlook those because we do have a chance to do things differently. And we need to be talking about how we, as they harness these tools for the good.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there's a huge concern with algorithmic discrimination. So this idea that the data that these tools are trained on is not going to be representative and it's going to lead to the same biases, perpetuate the biases that may already exist or perhaps even worsen them. We know, for example, that around 50% of health AI data comes from America and China. That's not globally representative. How valid are these tools beyond those shores? And also how good are they within populations? So if we still use these tools as proxies in some ways that they're not fine-grained enough in their predictions for certain populations or if we're still omitting certain data or if we're training them in already biased data, we're going to have a whole host”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because I think it's a bit self serving as well from a medical professional perspective. It's preserving their status in a sense, which is, yes, they do have expertise. But I think most people, and there are going to be some people who will become more anxious, it could be younger people, because they're faster adopters of these tools and they're spending a lot of time online. It's a whole other set of issues. We need to be more judicious, perhaps, whenever we hear that argument levelled.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tend to be very savvy about that as well. So the issue is, I think, we do need more research, and I think people are going to use these tools more as a sort of first opinion. They might also use it as a second opinion to check what their doctor said. And doctors suspect that. And the surveys I've done, they say, we think patients are going to use these tools before they come to us. They also suspect that they're going to dump their medical records where patients have access to their records. They're going to dump them in to do their own analyses. So, and I'm trying, in Sweden, I'm doing research on patients' attitudes about what their experiences with these tools. So we need more information on how patients are using these tools. But I also slightly worry that there's a sort of almost sort of patronizing attitude towards patients. Oh, they won't be able to use these tools. They're not going to be shrewd enough. And I worry about that perspective.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, it's a really great point, and this is actually a point I think that doctors make a lot. And I want to push back on it because actually when you look, because the internet's been around for a while now, and Dr. Google was always the worry, you know, everything, you go online, everything seems to point to cancer and the brain tumor, whatever it is, and people descend any sort of cyber rabbit holes that leads to it's not my own phrase, cyber chondria. But in fact, when you look at patient surveys, patients are actually pretty good at understanding that that's a risk. And in fact, what they tend to want is to do the research, but they also ultimately wanted a doctor to provide the ultimate expertise. So I suppose what I would say to that is, and by the way, even digital immigrants, so people who were born before the internet.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's very largely overlooked. We don't talk about elder care as nearly enough. So there are those sorts of biases. And this is where AI tools, they can crunch through data. Now, we've got to be able to curate and train the data in particular because that's a whole other set of issues. But to that extent, it becomes more specific for the individual. It becomes the case of lesson I've seen this in 10 patients before than I've seen this in a billion patients or something like that exaggerates. We get closer to specificity for individuals when this is done well.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Colossal knowledge demand. But what we find is people with rare illnesses, and there's only one server them aware of on this, and we need more, they're twice as likely to use generative AI tools. And that's partly because they want to keep up to date or they may have more trust already in what the internet can offer. So this issue of possibly being able to offer personalized in terms of the rarity of the condition and the symptoms. And we do know that there's sort of biases and omissions baked into medical education to some extent, partly because it's hard to keep up to date, as we've said, but also, you know, female health is not discussed nearly enough. I did discuss that in the book. There's problems with the ageing populations, geriatric medicine.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brother's case that was 20 years before he got a diagnosis. And in this case, you've got, it was very easy to say, well, the silly old doctors, why can't they keep up to date with this? But it is personal. We could get a more specific”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it could help with a more personalized approach. I'll give the example even of, so even in terms of diagnostic accuracy, for example, we can get into telemedicine too a bit, but there's 7,000 rare diseases in the world. And again, this is a knowledge issue keeping up to date. And medicine's always personal. You know, if you go to your doctor and protect, if you've got a rare condition, this is actually in my family as well. So I have a twin sister. She's got a form of muscular dystophy. And it's a very mild form. And my eldest brother, I'm one of four. My eldest brother had it as well, has it. It's degenerative. But this, it has various symptoms like fatigue and cramping and the kinds of symptoms that are very vague. And to a doctor, it's really hard to pull together what exactly it could be. But certainly my elder...”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To offer empathy more consistently, the more people. And then the other part of this Emma is you could have doctors who are partnering so they edit what GPT for example. It's not going to be ChatGPT, but generative AI tools are offering and they offer something that's a bit more tailored. And again, I think we need more patience studies to see what do people think about that arrangement. Do they think that's genuine or ERZATs or just, you know, is it a bit fake and phony? Because increasingly we see even on email or whatever, we see these sorts of responses that are written clearly written by AN, there's part of me that thinks it's a bit like junk mail now. I want to see a rail. I want to see the Warts and all human response. So yeah, it's complicated to answer.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second issue in relation to this is one thing doing sort of blinded trials, but if you know you're interacting with something and it's just the AI offering the so-called empathy, do you feel it's proper empathy? I know of at least one study that found we do hold AI to a higher bar, but interestingly when people find out so that people prefer AI's responses, this was University of California Southern California study, when patients are blinded, they certainly do prefer the AI's responses, but when it's transparent and it's honest that it was an AI that wrote it, it goes down to around the same level as what a human would write. And that becomes interesting because the issues at scale are we able to”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“English that was being, and you know, 50% internet's in English, probably a lot of it is American, probably even could be West Coast. So there was this sort of cultural valence to it. Having said that, so the original question, could AI do empathy? You know, if we ask patients what they want, they want their emotions to be recognised, they want, and ultimately AI can do that. They don't necessarily want doctors to be weeping or sort of fellow tragedians in their suffering, but they want them to understand what they're going through.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“the UK and different health systems in the world people are increasingly getting access to their online records and if you asked ChatGPT to write a summary a GP summary we did three different chronic illnesses to write it in an accessible and understandable accessible and empathetic way for patients and when we did an analysis of the notes versus a GP's note which was there fictionalized notes but they were sort of analysed to check for by other doctors to see if there were sort of standard notes. We couldn't see any trace of empathy in the notes but when Chat CPT did it was so rich and empty it was in fact it was a little overweening at times it was sort of like we're on this journey it was a bit hallmark-ish, we're on this journey together and things like that peppered so we're like okay it needs to be toned down a little bit which was interesting in itself because it sort of was kind of California”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question. I discuss it in the book. I think so some really interesting studies were one by a guy called Ayer who looked at ChatGPT's responses. This was a blinded experiment where he looked at ChatGPT's responses to patients' inquiries. They were on Reddit, I think. compared that to doctors' responses to patients' inquiries and what he got doctors to rate for empathy both response and the set was blinded and what doctors rated the Chat CPT's responses is 10 times more empathetic than their fellow physicians response which is really fascinating I've also done studies on this where we looked at a visit note so for”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Worry sometimes that's considered a very soft skill and it's an easy skill and it's really not and there are also challenges with the distribution of empathies, something that also succumbs to human bias. It can be quite limited. People get burnt out by it. So administering empathy is not the easy aspect of healthcare that perhaps sometimes medicine is guilty of supposing.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could say, you know, say AI is doing a large burden of diagnostics or clinical judgment or there's some arrangement with doctors and AI partnering together. It may be that we actually could have a new role of people who are properly empathizers. It's sort of a false dichotomy to say it's either AI or it's doctors. We could be looking to other professionals to take on some of these roles or patient peers, patients get a lot out of turning to other individuals who've experienced their own health problems. It's a very long-winded answer, but these quite complicated areas too. But I would say that all is not lost when”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“slightly robotic odd things that were said that were quite unsettling and hard to unhear related to that, you know, when it comes to serious test results, I have colleagues in the States, you know, most doctors think that patients want them there to deliver bad news. What studies find is overwhelmingly 96% of patients who are surveyed, three-centred study, they wanted to get the information themselves in their own time. Now in the States, that's US, that's an online health system. Now that seems quite staggering, but if there's ways to communicate really bad news where patients have time to understand it and then to formulate the questions, they can make better use of a visit. So there's interesting intricate questions about the role that doctors or indeed within AI.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grasping at straws a little bit, sort of the idea is that even if there's AI will always be needed. But what I do think is there's huge capacity for AI in terms of, well, it's a very challenging area, but in offering what can look like empathetic communication, I think doctors sometimes overestimate sometimes overestimate the role that they play with patients. I mean, most of us have experience, I say the sort of priestly role that they may have with patients. Patients don't necessarily look to doctors for sort of full-bodied empathy. They want to be spoken to compassionately and they want, especially, and I've witnessed it, I had a partner who died of cancer, and I witnessed amazing care, but I also witnessed some sort of...”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A great question. Again, as we come back to some of the surveys I've done and the thing that's even getting into the empathy aspect of it, the thing that doctors, even doctors view their clinical acumen as really a core to what they do. But when you ask them which of your tasks do you think could actually be taken over by technology the thing they're least likely to believe AI will take over is empathy. And when you do qualitative research, they say you look, we're essentially a people business. Patients want us and they want the empathy that we can deliver. And sometimes what you find is sort of an attitude that only doctors can provide a certain level of empathy here. Now, I'm quite critical of this attitude in the book. I think it's to some extent, I think it's...”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A conversation, you often feel like you're having conversation with a person, which is another issue we can get into. But I think that it demonstrates that there's some utility from these tools and documentation is a thing that clinicians' administrative tasks is a thing they really want help with, that they feel completely burnt out by. Studies are really mixed about whether in fact it does improve efficiencies with documentation, so even just to take that one task. But there is some evidence that it doesn't reduce the time taken, but it does reduce the feelings of burnout associated and burden associated with the task. So I would be very wary of offering a blanket response. I think it depends on what we're thinking about, what tools, and also who you ask.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that it's a really interesting question and very often the rationale for embedding AI is exactly that. It's to make life easier for doctors. It's to, predominantly from a health systems perspective, let's cut costs, let's make things more efficient. Those are great aspirations, but do they actually work in practice? What's really interesting is I did surveys, actually did the largest survey when it was conducted. I've done surveys for many years and doctors' opinions about technology, but this was specifically on generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT. So 2024, we asked 1,000 UK GPs, are you using these tools for any aspect of clinical practice? 20% said that they were. Now that shows, and there's something different about these tools because they're more dialogic in nature. You feel like you're having...”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned what we talk about is a digital divide. Some patients just do not have access to these technologies. 57% was the 2024 figures, about 50% of the world's population has mobile device. A lot of potential, I could keep saying got to be harnessed properly and thought about very seriously.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's going to be, there are challenges there. So even aside from within health systems, and I think what we're going to see with technology is more than likely a very long period of flux between embracing these tools. The key issue is how you embed them in workflows. I sometimes call it the last mile problem. And you can have this flashy technology, but how do you actually integrate it into practice? Then from the patient side of things, by the way, change in healthcare is extremely difficult, partly for the reasons we've talked about, which is keeping up to date. Doctors are burnt out. 50% of doctors are burnt out. In the UK, about 4 in 10 GPs say they can't keep up with their workload. I mean, it's really, they're the second victims in all of this too. So the other side of it then is patience. And as you”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so on. But I see doctors only practice optimal evidence based medicine around 50% of the time. We have a number of reviews on that. And that's alarming. So the question then is, can we use technology to do these things better and to ensure that there are fewer errors in healthcare? I think there's still a big question mark about that, but we need to think constructively about that.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doctors were to scan 2% of the relevant articles, he'd be spending 22 hours a day. It doesn't even awful a lot of time to actually practice medicine, never mind sleep. There's noise in medicine, time of day in which you see a doctor, we know screening for certain cancers can diminish as the day goes on, while antibiotic prescribing goes up. There's differences in age. I'm 48 at the age from our 40s cognitive decline starts to kick in. It's harder to keep up to date. The other side of the puzzle is, you know, when you're a junior doctor, you can't always sort of practice on mannequins and fake patients. Eventually you have to practice on real people. And that's how they learn their skills. So there's all of these aspects of noise keeping up to date. We know doctors practice. We often hear about patients not adhering to treatments.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So if you consider diagnostic error, diagnostic error is quite a young field by the way. I say in the book it's younger than keeping up with Kardashians. So it basically is an organised field only initiated in around 2011. But diagnostic error is rampant. So between 5 to around 20% of visits will lead to a diagnostic error. Some of those are going to harm people. We kind of might want to point the finger at doctors where that's ridiculous. Why are they not keeping up to date? Why aren't they doing their job properly? The flip side of that I sort of mentioned the idea of keeping up to date is a real challenge. I made a calculation via looking at PubMed, which is a repository of biomedical articles. And if doctors were just to scan, so it was every 39 seconds, there's a biomedical article published.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have the gravest demands, and we do expect them to be gods. We kind of collude in this idea that they should be godlike. But equally, there are other challenges with patience, and that is we tend to cover up some of our symptoms sometimes. The psychology of the visit is a sort of one that involves status psychology, where patients can be deferential. I do say in the book, and it sounds hyperbole, but some people are dying of embarrassment. So there are various things that happen to interfere, there are psychological pitfalls with the visit, diagnostic error is very high for very understandable reasons. So I'm covering the challenges and I'm trying to say, look, can AI help with any of these? And I have a cautious, very cautiously caveated response in that there is potential there.”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So the book is basically asking the question, what are the problems in healthcare to which AI could potentially be a solution? And I'm focused on some of the issues. I focus on sort of the idea that in traditional healthcare, we visit a bricks and mortar clinic for the most part. So I consider things like access barriers, but I also predominantly think about the psychological limitations of current healthcare. And that's both from the medical doctor's perspective. So even if we had like the most lavishly funded healthcare system in the world, is there going to be a ceiling effect on our cognition, keeping up to date with medical knowledge? And the demands on doctors are absolutely colossal. I think even of all the professions, they have the most”
2025-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Could AI Help Save Lives? With Dr Charlotte Blease · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT