AI for Female Physicians: What We Lose by Not Being in the Room

Let me try to put into words where I actually stand on AI right now, because it’s taken me a while to get here and I’m not sure I’m fully here yet.

A few months ago I started my learn-about-AI journey. Not because I was excited about it. Because I was scared of it.

I’ve learned that fear without information is just paralysis. AI for female physicians isn’t a future problem we can defer. It’s a now problem, and the question I kept coming back to was whether I was going to engage with it or keep my head in the sand.

The fear is still real. I’ve seen I, Robot. I’m not being talked out of that.

Powerful tools used badly do real damage and the speed at which this is all moving is uncomfortable hard to sit with.

But here’s where I landed: staying out of the conversation isn’t the safe option. It just feels like one.

What Actually Happens When We Opt Out

A few months ago, Reese Witherspoon posted something that blew up the internet.

Her point, echoed by other women who are leading the AI education and ethical use charge, was simple: AI is disproportionately likely to affect women. This includes AI for female physicians.

Not because we’re less able (obviously not), but because the roles most likely to be restructured first tend to skew female.

The people who most need to be shaping AI policy, AI integration and AI ethics are exactly the people at highest risk of being talked out of the room. This. Is. Us. Women. Female physicians.

Ignoring AI doesn’t make the decisions about it go away. It just means those decisions get made without us.

That felt more uncomfortable than end-of-world I, Robot fear.

Learning to Use It Without Losing Your Mind

Starting from zero with AI feels a lot like showing up to a subspecialty conference in a field you’ve never practiced. Everyone is four levels deeper than your working vocabulary. You’re still on the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page and they’re somewhere in chapter seven.

That’s where this girl started. And honestly, a lot of the time that still feels like where I am.

What’s helped is having a structured way in rather than just typing something into a chat box and hoping for the best. Because the difference between AI that produces generic slop and AI that actually does something useful is almost entirely about how you set it up.

A two-week meal plan built around my preferences, my time limitations, my goals and what I actually like to eat is entirely possible and is not the same thing as a generic meal plan. The former could give me an hour on Saturday morning back. The latter is useless.

The same logic applies professionally. AI that knows how I think, what I’m trying to say and who I’m talking to produces something worth reading. AI that doesn’t know me produces content that reads like it was written by a committee.

I’m still learning that distinction. But I can already feel the difference.

The Bottom Line

Is AI going to change medicine? Yes. Is some of that change going to be uncomfortable? 100p. Are there applications of this technology that genuinely worry me? Still, absolutely, yes.

But opting out doesn’t protect me from any of it. It just guarantees I’m not part of the conversation about how it goes. And I’ll always be behind.

For female physicians who are already navigating businesses (yes, your practice is a business) we were never trained to run, adding one more thing to learn feels unreasonable. I know. I feel that too. But this one might just have a higher cost for ignoring it than most.

The physicians who understand how these tools work are going to be the ones in the room when the rules get written.

I’d rather be in the room.

The goal isn’t to become an AI expert. It’s to stop letting fear make the decision for me.

Dr. Kate Boehm, MD, MEd, FRCSC is a reconstructive plastic surgeon and the founder of DuplicateMeMD. She stubbornly believes that practice management is the key for female physicians get time back.