Doctors Push Back on RFK Jr.’s AI Comments

Physician groups are pushing back against recent remarks by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggesting that artificial intelligence (AI) can be superior to physicians for making diagnoses and prescribing drugs.

“Statements suggesting AI is inherently better informed than physicians, or that physicians cannot be trusted to make clinical decisions without first consulting this technology, diminish physician expertise and risk undermining patients’ trust,” the American Medical Association and five other physician groups said in a joint statement. “Physicians evaluate patients in context, drawing on years of training and experience. They ask questions, understand each patient’s unique needs and circumstances, exercise professional judgment, and take responsibility for the care they provide.”

“Pitting physicians against technology or suggesting AI should replace physician expertise does not advance this important work,” they added.

The groups were responding to remarks made by Kennedy at the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) summit meeting in Washington on Tuesday.

“Sam Altman was over in our office a couple of days ago, and he said something interesting to me,” Kennedy said, referring to the CEO of AI company OpenAI. “He said that 2 years ago, ‘I wouldn’t have advised anybody to take medical advice alone from AI. But today it would be malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or to make a prescription without at least checking AI.'”

“And one of the things that we’re doing at our agency is we’re making it easy for every American to use AI too,” he continued. “One of the things that is going to change is that we’re never ever again going to be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us, ‘Trust the experts.’ Every American will be able to check their own medical advice. They’ll also be able to check the advice of public officials. If somebody tells you, ‘Masks work; trust the experts,’ AI may tell you otherwise … And if somebody tells you that a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection and you need to take it to protect your grandmother, AI may say, ‘It actually doesn’t do that.’ So it really has the capacity to … free us from medical tyranny.”

In response to Kennedy’s comments, Jason Goldman, MD, immediate past president of the American College of Physicians, one of the groups behind the joint statement, noted in a video posted on Instagram that Kennedy’s remarks “show his ignorance of and contempt for the medical profession.”

He also questioned Kennedy’s assertion that medical tyranny exists. “There is no medical tyranny,” he said. “No one is forcing patients to see physicians. Physicians make recommendations, and patients are free to listen to them or not listen to them. These are recommendations; nothing is forced, and there’s nothing tyrannical about it.”

As for the idea that it would be “malpractice” for doctors not to consult AI before making a diagnosis or writing a prescription, Goldman said that “artificial intelligence is a tool, and it is only as good as the information being fed into it, and it can make mistakes and come to faulty conclusions. It’s not a second opinion, it’s not a replacement for a physician, and to make such a statement is extremely dangerous and irresponsible.”

Kennedy’s comments on AI are the most recent in a long line of remarks from the Trump administration questioning medical expertise. When President Trump signed an executive order in August that shrunk the number of universally recommended vaccines for children and called for splitting up the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot, he repeatedly suggested that the number or timing of vaccines could play a role in rising rates of autism spectrum disorder, even as scientific consensus and decades of studies have firmly concluded there is no link.

And last year, under Kennedy’s direction, the CDC changed language on its website to suggest there may be a link between vaccines and autism.