the most useful thing ai did for me this month had nothing to do with business

a call that was supposed to happen this week mostly didn't, because both of us were dealing with family medical situations at the same time, an odd coincidence that turned into the more honest conversation. i'd been in and out of a hospital with a family member, and somewhere in the middle of that i started recording doctor's appointments as voice notes and feeding the transcript to ai afterward, along with photos of whiteboard notes and prescriptions that are never as legible as the person writing them thinks they are.

it was, plainly, invaluable. a doctor's appointment moves fast, uses terms you half remember, and you're absorbing it while also managing your own fear about whatever's happening to someone you love. having a transcript to actually sit with afterward, ask follow up questions against, cross check a dosage or a term you weren't sure you heard right, turned a blur into something i could actually process and act on.

the person on the other end of that call had done almost the exact same thing independently, for a different diagnosis, pathology reports instead of a hospital visit. neither of us had compared notes on this beforehand. we'd both just arrived at the same instinct under pressure: point ai at the confusing, high stakes medical information and ask it to help you understand what you're actually looking at.

we both landed on the same word for why more people don't do this: fear. not fear of ai specifically, fear of medical information generally, a sense that you're not qualified to even organize your own notes about your own family's health, so people just don't try. i think that fear is costing people clarity at exactly the moment they need it most.

if someone you loved was in a confusing medical situation tomorrow, would you know to start recording and asking, or would you just try to remember it all in your head?