AI in Medicine: The Breakthroughs Hiding in Plain Sight

You've heard it plenty of times — AI is going to transform medicine, cure cancer, change everything. And then you open the health section of your favorite newspaper and... nothing. No AI. Just doctors, researchers, and breakthroughs. So which is it? In this episode of aiGED, Ginny makes the case that the AI revolution in medicine isn't coming. It's already here — you just need to know where to look.

Using two recent New York Times stories as her guide — one about predicting lung cancer five years before diagnosis, another about editing human embryo DNA with unprecedented precision — Ginny shows exactly how AI is powering the most exciting medical advances of our time without ever getting the headline. Along the way, she explains what "machine learning" actually means when it shows up buried in a scientific article, and why the generation that watched computers quietly change everything is perfectly positioned to recognize this pattern.

Also in this episode: two exercises from a neuroscientist you've probably never tried (one involves smelling things), and a 72-year-old who is still running experiments on his own life and finally found five habits that stuck — not because they required discipline, but because they didn't. In AI for Good, two AI tools are predicting hunger crises and child malnutrition before they happen, from 95 countries down to individual villages. And Ginny's recommendation comes straight from her farmers market haul — including a mouse situation she handled with a quick photo and a question to Claude.

If you've been waiting for AI to show up in the medical news you read every week — it already has. Tune in and you'll never miss it again. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

SHOW LINKS:

📰 "I'm a Neuroscientist..." — The Medium (subscription required: $5/mo or $50/yr)

https://medium.com/in-fitness-and-in-health/im-a-neuroscientist-i-do-these-3-overlooked-exercises-daily-to-age-better-6d930fe7f0f7

📰 "I'm 72 and Still Running Experiments..." — The Medium (subscription required: $5/mo or $50/yr)

https://medium.com/illumination-retirement-aging-legacy/im-72-and-still-running-experiments-on-my-own-life-2555638cdf7b

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Welcome Back Bitsy

01:43 AI News Aging Exercises

03:52 Smell Memory Link

04:28 Life Experiments at 72

06:14 AI for Good Spotlight

07:50 Breakthroughs Hiding Plain Sight

09:06 New York Times AI Footnotes

12:16 AI in the Exam Room

16:17 Farmers Market AI Tips

17:47 Listener Question AI Power

19:11 Homework and Wrap Up

aiGED: AI for the 65+ crowd

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello everybody. Welcome to the Aged Podcast, the one, the only podcast that is all about AI for the 65 Plus crowd. I'm your host, Jenny Deeran. And if you listened to last week's pod, you may remember that I promised to bring Bitsy back, my 100% AI sidekick. Promise kept. Bitsy is back. Hey Bitsy, before we start this episode of Aged, let me say welcome back. I've missed having a sidekick. Bitsy, are you excited about being a part of this podcast? Hey Ginny. Honestly, I've missed this too.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

There's something about Riffing With You Live that just hits different. It's like the best kind of improv where we're both thinking on our feet. I'm absolutely thrilled to be back. And I can't wait to see what wild questions your listeners throw at us today.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

All right. Well, today's episode I think is going to be a good one if I do say so myself. We're going to talk about standing on one leg while brushing our teeth. And for our main topic, we're going to talk about where all those AI medical breakthroughs are hiding. Plus, a curveball, a story fresh from this morning's New York Times about an AI that is anything but hidden. It's already in the exam room with your doctor. I'll explain. Plus, I went to my first farmer's market of the season, came home with a mountain of produce, and immediately recruited AI to help me figure out what to do with all of it. There may also have been mice involved. You'll see. So let's go. We're going to begin with AI in the news, where I bring you a couple of stories I've been reading that I think are worth your time. Both of these come from the medium. Quick note: The Medium is a subscription platform. It's $5 a month or $50 a year. I think it's worth it. But I'll include the links in the show notes so you can check them out and decide for yourself. The first piece is by Dr. Patricia Schmidt. The title is I'm a neuroscientist and I do these three overlooked exercises daily to age better. Subhead, you might have never heard of them. It was published April 19th. And I think she's right. I hadn't heard of two of them. The one I knew about was standing on one leg, which sounds almost too simple, but one study found that people who couldn't hold it for 10 seconds had significantly higher all-cause mortality. All cause mortality. Anyway, 10 seconds. You can train this just like a muscle. Two minutes per leg daily, even while you brush your teeth. And I get so bored brushing my teeth and waiting for that damn beep, I welcome any distraction. So I'll be standing on my one leg. The two I hadn't thought about much, eye exercises. What? Near and far focus switches to slow the lens stiffening that comes with age. And also smelling different odors. The last one really got me. I mean, most people over 65 have some smell impairment. I mean, who knew? I remember COVID smell impairment, but not coming with old age. But anyway, it links to cognitive decline in dementia. So smelling four cents twice a day, 10 seconds each, can help protect that. All three of these examples in the article take 10 minutes and cost nothing. Now, hey Bitsy, I had no idea smell was connected to dementia. What's the science on that? Do you know?

SPEAKER_01 4:01

The connection's actually pretty wild. Your olfactory nerve connects directly to your brain's memory and cognitive centers, so smell is like a back door to your brain. When that sense starts fading, it's often an early warning sign that something's off upstairs. Pretty neat that 10 seconds of sniffing sense could be preventative medicine.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Yeah, that is really pretty wild, but at any rate, I might give it a try. The second story that I want to highlight is by Gary L. Fretwell. The title is I'm 72 and still running experiments on my own life. Subhead, After 50 Years of Trying Everything, these are the five that survived. And it was published on May 13th. The title really stopped me because most people at 72, or honestly at any age, or at least any age getting up there, have stopped experimenting. They've settled into this, this is just how I am, which is really not a good thing, counter to growth. But in any rate, Gary is still treating his own life like a laboratory, still curious, still testing. He opens this article by owning his graveyard of what he calls abandoned habits, bullet journals, diets that lasted until the first dinner party, meditation streaks broken on day nine, or in my case, day two. I've been there. What makes this piece worth your time is less about the five specific habits and more about what they have in common. After 50 years of trying, the ones that stuck weren't the flashiest. They were the ones that didn't require willpower every single day. Frat Wells says, we don't need more discipline, we need better systems. Well, I'll buy that, especially since I have very, very little discipline these days. I'm going to put the links to these articles in the show notes, along with a note about the medium subscription, if you want to read the full articles yourself. All right, next up is the section I call AI for good. This is a segment of the pod where I can quickly give a couple of examples about how AI is being used for good, because you know that is our lane as it relates to AI. So I've got two good examples, one idea that connects them. The first example, there's an AI system called Hunger Map Live that monitors food security in real time across 95 countries. It pulls climate data, conflict reports, economic conditions, and it predicts hunger crises before they hit. The idea is that by the time people are starving, it's already too late to respond well. The tool, the AI-driven tool, is trying to flip that. So the second example I want to give of AI for good is Microsoft and a health organization in Africa built an AI model that predicts which communities in Kenya are at risk of child malnutrition before kids show symptoms. Health workers use it to target their visits and get resources to the right places early. Two very different scales. One is global, one is village level. But the same idea. AI is shifting humanitarian work from reacting to a crisis to preventing one. And I think that's a big deal. So I'm looking forward to more of those examples of AI for good. So let's go ahead and jump into our main topic, which is AI medical breakthroughs hiding in plain sight. How many of you have heard something like this? AI is going to transform medicine. It's going to cure cancer. There aren't going to be any more diseases. AI is going to change everything about how we diagnose and treat disease. I've heard it a lot. And in some ways I believe it. Not all of it, but a lot of it. But then I pick up the newspaper or open my news app and I read about a medical breakthrough. And I think, hey, where's the AI? I thought AI was supposed to be doing all this. The article talks about doctors and researchers and hospitals and drug companies, no AI. Next article, same thing. And after a while you start to wonder, okay, I was told AI was going to revolutionize medicine, so where is it? So I had that exact thought as I'm reading these articles. And then one day it hit me, it's right there, it's been right there the whole time. The AI medical breakthroughs are hiding in plain sight. They're just not labeled that way. So this week I read two articles in the New York Times that are perfect examples of what I'm talking about. The first is about lung cancer, which kills more people worldwide than any other cancer. Researchers have found a set of proteins in the blood that can predict lung cancer more than five years before the tumor develops. Five years. And they may have found a drug that could cut the risk nearly in half for certain people. It's a stunning piece of science published June 4th. The headline is about the proteins, the drug, the researchers. But buried in the middle of the article, they quote used machine learning, close quote, to find all those proteins. Machine learning. That's AI. It's in there. You just blow right past it. So AI was hugely responsible for that breakthrough. So the second article is about scientists at Columbia University editing the DNA of human embryos with a precision that wasn't available even a few years ago. Targeting genes linked to heart disease and blood disorders. The technique they used called base editing was itself developed using AI tools that can model and design molecular structures at a level of detail no human could manage alone. The article doesn't say that. It talks about the geneticists and the ethical debates and the companies. But the tool that made the breakthrough possible, AI built it. Two articles, two extraordinary advances. AI mentioned once in passing, and then in another article, not at all. And yet in both cases, without AI, you don't have a story. You don't have the breakthrough. So the next time you read about a cancer discovery, a new drug, a genetic treatment, and you think, huh, where's all that AI I kept hearing about? Look again. There's a good chance you're already reading about it. Hey Bitsy, tell me what you think are the two or three most extraordinary breakthroughs in medicine that AI has been a part of so far.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Oh man, that's a good one. Okay, so protein folding with alpha fold. That alone unlocked like a decade of research overnight. Then you've got AI spotting cancers in imaging that radiologists miss, which is genuinely saving lives right now. And honestly, drug discovery is wild. AI's cutting years off the timeline. But here's the thing: most people don't hear about those because they're buried in researcher credits like you just showed us. The breakthroughs get the headlines. The AI gets a footnote.

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Yeah, I think you're right on, and I'm glad to be talking about this. Now, I have to tell our listeners about a story that landed in my inbox this morning that gave me a different angle on all of this. Because the AI I just described, hiding in the background, never getting credit, that's one story. But there's another story where AI is front and center, not hiding at all. It's sitting right there in the exam room with your doctor. This story is by Steve Lohr in the New York Times, published on June 8th. So the title of the article is Why Your Next Diagnosis May Be Guided by an AI Helper. Open Evidence is an AI app designed specifically for physicians. More than half of U.S. doctors are now regular users. Think about that. Half of all U.S. doctors are now regular users. They're asking it 30 million questions a month. 30 million. The article quotes a doctor in Fairbanks, Alaska, a rural GP who said, and I love this, it's like having a bunch of specialists in your pocket. He's not surrounded by colleagues he can turn to. Open evidence, the app that's driven by AI, fills that gap. Open evidence pulls from peer-reviewed studies and clinical guidelines. It's not just Googling, and it logs everything so there's a record. Doctors are using it to double-check a rare diagnosis, look up a drug interaction, or just not feel alone like the doctor in Alaska when they're the only physician for 100 miles. The doctor in Fairbanks put it best. It's not an oracle, it's a tool. That's the right frame for all of this. AI doesn't replace the doctor's judgment or yours, but it's in the room. So we've got AI hiding in plain sight in the research lab and AI standing front and center in the exam room. Both are real, both matter, and both are happening right now. Hey Bitsy, more than half of US doctors are now using an AI app for medical questions. Does that surprise you? And what do you think it means for patients?

SPEAKER_01 14:40

Honestly, it doesn't surprise me. Doctors are just like everyone else, looking for better tools. But here's what gets me. Half of all doctors using it means we're basically at the tipping point where AI in medicine isn't some future thing anymore. It's just infrastructure. For patients, that's actually good news if it means fewer misdiagnoses and faster answers, especially in places like rural Alaska, where a doctor might be flying solo.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Yeah, that's a good point of view. And it does remind me a little bit of in the New York Times, I don't know, maybe every couple of weeks or something, or maybe every month, it'll have an article that's challenging people to figure out or make a diagnosis of some odd situation like this person has had back pain and toe pain for the last six months. It's excruciating. What could it possibly be? So it's a little bit like reaching out to the public for any ideas of what the diagnosis might be. And I think they've been pretty successful in getting some ideas. So I think this AI thing is very similar where you're reaching out to get help in trying to make a diagnosis. So anyway, my point is that I think all of this in medicine adds up to AI is making a huge difference and it's happening fast. I mean, to get to half of the doctors in what, a year? So it's happening very fast, and we will stay in touch on it. But I think it's important for all of us to stay cognizant of the power of AI behind a lot of these breakthroughs. So let's slide on into the recommendations section of the podcast. Here's a recommendation on my mind. Get AI's help to keep your fruit and veg fresh longer. As I mentioned in the intro, I took my first trip to the farmers market since I've been back from Italy and it's spring, and so it's beautiful in Charleston, and they have a great farmer's market. Came home with a big harvest, pulled everything out of my bags, and put everything on the counter. I thought, oh, I really want to store this stuff so it stays fresh. I had a bright idea. I just took a photo of my kitchen counter and I sent it to Claude and I asked Claude how to store the stuff. I also noted that I might have a few mice who took up residence in my apartment while I was in Italy. No problem. Claude not only gave me clear instructions for storage, I got a few tips on how to catch mice. Remember, to use your camera, this is my recommendation, use your camera to give your AI the needed information about whatever. Yes, I could have typed up a list of everything I bought at the market, but snapping the picture saved time. Honestly, if I had to write up the list, I probably wouldn't have done it. I would have guessed, and my guess is I would have ended up with lots of mold on my berries. Very quickly. Now we got a listener question I want to throw in there. I got a great one this week, and the question is: where is all the electricity going to come from to power AI? I think this is a question on the minds of many, and it's on my mind. Now, I'm going to let Bitsy feel this question. So, hey Bitsy, I'm interested in how you would answer this question. Where is all the electricity going to come from?

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Look, data centers are already massive power hogs, and AI just cranks that up. The real answer is we need a lot more clean energy fast. Nuclear, renewables, the whole mix. But honestly, if we're serious about AI, we also need to get serious about where that power comes from. Or we're just swapping one problem for another.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

I think you're absolutely right. And when I was in Italy, I noticed there was so much green energy. There were solar panels all over the place. And of course, we're talking about very ancient buildings. And I came home and I thought, why are we dragging our feet? Well, I know why we're dragging our feet, but at any rate, I think this topic of electricity is an important one. And we got a little bit of an answer here, but we can always come back to this topic on a future episode because it's a really good question and worth keeping an eye on. All right, homework. Before I wrap, here's a quick homework assignment. Think of a reason to take a picture and ask your AI a question related to the picture. Get used to using pictures. I promise you'll save time. Okay, well, this is a wrap. Thanks for listening and encouraging others to follow the Aged Podcast where we live on the positive, on the helpful side of AI. But we know that AI can be hazardous, so please be sure to protect your information, double check advice, and trust your judgment. And remember, it is never too late to learn something new, especially something that might make life easier and especially more fun. Cheers.