There is something not quite right about letting a patient dictate whether or not they take medicine. Are mental patients the people to whom we should be leaving the decisions?

I have better rapport with the patient, because I'm not reaching for things on the machine. Patients also like the ?high-tech' aspect and feel like they're really being scanned on a top-of-the-line system, which gives them even more confidence that they're getting a quality exam.

The nurse read them again. This time, I wrote them down. Then I spent a minute studying them. She was afebrile, I noted. That was good. Her heart rated was 96, a high number I had no idea how to interpret. Her blood pressure was 152 over 84, another highish set of numbers that told me nothing. Her respiratory rate was 26 - also high, and vaguely disquieting. Her O2 sat - the oxygen content of her blood - was 92 percent: low, and in the context of that high respiratory rate not a good sign. The nurse was still looking at me. "I hear she's a whiner," I said hopefully. The nurse shrugged. "She asked me to call you.

I am not invested with dictatorial powers. If I were, I should be quite ready to dictate.

I am as poor as Job, my lord, but not so patient.

Doctors know medicine or literature, they don't know the patient. With Big Data, They would.