I
The Measured Body
What happens when pain, symptoms, sleep, movement, mood, and experience are translated into signals that machines can measure? Measurement can reveal more about us while also changing what medicine recognizes as real.
Currently Writing · Aiming for 2028
The Automated Patient
What happens to care when the technology works?
A book about artificial intelligence in medicine, told from the patient's side of the encounter. The central question is not simply whether increasingly capable systems can diagnose, document, recommend, and respond. It is what happens to care when they can.
Final cover coming soon
The Question
Medicine can become more capable while the patient becomes less present within it.
Most discussions about artificial intelligence in healthcare ask whether the technology is accurate, efficient, or safe.
Those questions matter. But they are not the only questions that matter.
A system may successfully translate symptoms into data, summarize an encounter, identify an abnormality, recommend a course of action, or provide support at any hour of the day. Each capability can improve care.
The Automated Patient asks what happens around those successes: to the patient's experience, to clinical judgment, to responsibility, and to the relationship that has historically made medicine more than the delivery of technically correct answers.
Response Is Not Relationship
A system can respond to a patient.
That does not mean it can stand in relationship with one.
Relationships contain continuity, memory, obligation, vulnerability, and mutual stake. As machines become better at producing the behaviors associated with care, that distinction becomes easier to overlook.
Inside the Book
From the measured body to human medicine.
The book begins with the conversion of experience into data, follows automation deeper into the clinical encounter, and ends with a practical question: which rights, responsibilities, and forms of participation must remain human?
II
The Automated Clinic
Artificial intelligence moves from recording and organizing care toward interpreting, recommending, and acting within it. The question becomes where assistance ends and substitution begins.
III
Care Without Presence
Systems can respond quickly, patiently, and convincingly. But a response is not necessarily a relationship. What is lost when care becomes available without presence, continuity, or mutual stake?
IV
Who Is Responsible?
When judgment is distributed among clinicians, institutions, software, models, and protocols, responsibility can become harder to locate precisely when patients need someone accountable.
V
Keeping Medicine Human
The goal is not to reject useful technology. It is to preserve the patient's ability to understand, question, appeal, choose, and remain a participant in care.
Questions the Book Explores
What should remain human when more of medicine does not technically require a human?
Measurement
When experience becomes data, what becomes easier to see and what falls outside the frame?
Judgment
If a system can interpret symptoms, scans, records, and risk better than an individual clinician, where should human judgment remain authoritative?
Presence
Can a system provide something that feels like care without anyone actually being present with the person receiving it?
Relationship
What distinguishes a useful response from a relationship built through continuity, recognition, responsibility, and shared history?
Responsibility
Who answers to the patient when a consequential decision emerges from a chain of people, models, policies, and automated systems?
Patient Authority
As medicine becomes more automated, how do patients retain the ability to question, refuse, appeal, and understand decisions made about them?
Keeping Medicine Human
Better technology should expand care without making the patient incidental to it.
Artificial intelligence can reduce paperwork, expand access, identify patterns, support clinicians, and help patients understand their own health. Those benefits deserve to be taken seriously.
But efficiency is not the only measure of progress. Patients must retain meaningful authority within the systems that measure them, interpret them, recommend for them, and increasingly act around them.
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