I hear people saying that medicine can't have doctors be replaced by computers and it's more of an art than a science. I'd like to get more information and see why they think that and if their reasons really hold up. It intuitively seems to me computers can do a better job. Here are a few reasons:<p>1) When you think about what a doctor does, they use a combination of their memory, experience, knowledge and judgment.<p>2) Computers can remember a lot more relevant facts and wonmt forget them.<p>3) A doctor's experience is just with their own patients and what they hear at conferences and the literature they read. A computer network can literally aggregate experiences of many different doctors and cases around the world. A new superbug coming out, for instance, may have a treatment that few doctors know, because it's more prevalent in another country -- but a person using the network will be made aware of this treatment. The network will have much more experience than an individual. It will aggregate the outcomes of many therapies and studies.<p>4) The knowledge of the network can be extracted from the experiene and be much more extensive. Both beause the experence is extensive and because various methods of statistical analysis can be employed. A doctor isn't going to sit there and cross reference worldwide statistics on the success of using remedy X given factors of race, gender, age, etc. The computers can.<p>5) Finally, the judgment. Here is why the computers can beat a doctor's "gut" overall. They can cross correlate the knowledge from all around the world and find the most major factors. Then given the symptoms, race, age, location, etc. they can suggest the possible diagnoses given realtime epidemiological statistics and the additional tests that need to be done to establish which diagnosis is most probable. In many cases this establish a path to just one diagnosis with statistical accuracy exceeding what one doctor can produce. It can also list the next several possible diagnoses and the tests to establish them. After the diagnosis is established, it can find the therapies along with risk factors gleaned from all the relevant outcomes from around the world.<p>And this is just for conventional medicine. When we get into genetic therapies, computers and information science will become a huge part of medicine.