AI, Language, and Healing: The Role of Language in Medical Diagnosis
Specifically, within healthcare, even as AI has made colossal progress in improving the health outcomes of patients through telehealth and early diagnosis, the specific intersections of AI, language, and healthcare have been relatively underexplored.
It is then important to fully realize the extent to which language plays a vital role in the healthcare industry. Communication is of vital importance in healthcare, for it has the capacity to augment or exacerbate health outcomes, making clarity and precision a necessity. For example, patients need to be able to relay their ailments and concerns to their healthcare providers without hesitation or secrecy, even as doctors need to be transparent and clear with their patients to be able to forge mutual trust.
Hence, AI allows for the possibility of clearer communication between doctors and their patients. Specifically, in the case of patients who do not speak the same language as their healthcare professionals, AI is of tremendous utility. It is of vital importance for patients to feel comfortable when they are describing their ailments, pains, and concerns, as speaking in a foreign language creates the risk of healthcare experts missing crucial nuances, leading to faulty diagnoses, which might be extraneous at best, and prove harmful in the worst case.
Further, doctors from across the globe are able to help patients from far-off communities, wherein English is not the dominant language. Thus, AI increases collaboration between the medical fraternity and fosters a more interconnected world within the context of health.
By using techniques for domain adaptation, AI can generate translations with a high degree of accuracy, simply by feeding the AI copious amounts of medical data and vocabulary in multiple languages.
Further, AI also has the capacity to improve patient care, by allowing patients access to their medical information in a language that they understand, thereby fostering a sense within the patients that they have control over their lives. Because communication in an individual’s mother tongue breeds familiarity and allows individuals to feel as if they know exactly what is happening to them, artificial intelligence allows medical professionals to augment their bonds with their patients, specifically in the case of patients belonging to linguistic, ethnic, and racial minorities. This is significant because these communities are historically suspicious of the benevolent potential of medical science and healthcare, because of how these fields have historically hurt the interests of people from these communities, by dismissing their concerns, assuming they have a higher threshold for pain, offering lower quality healthcare, and using their bodies merely for experimental value.
Thus, language is a critical tool in medical diagnosis and treatment, serving as the base for patients and professionals to forge an empathetic and understanding relationship with each other. And, artificial intelligence is of vital importance in facilitating these improvements.
Sources
https://localization.saudisoft.com/ai-language-and-healthcare/