While colleges across the nation are adapting their curricula to harness the power of generative AI, U.S. medical schools remain dangerously behind.
Most students entering medicine today will graduate without ever being trained to use GenAI tools effectively. That must change. To prepare tomorrow’s doctors – and protect tomorrow’s patients – medical school deans, elected officials, and health care regulators must invest in training that matches the pace and promise of this technology.
Universities embrace AI as medical schools fall behind
Across the country, colleges and universities are reimagining how they educate students in the age of generative AI.
- At Duke University, every new student receives a custom AI assistant dubbed DukeGPT.
- At California State University, more than 460,000 students across 23 campuses now have access to a 24/7 ChatGPT toolkit.
These aren’t niche experiments. They’re part of a sweeping, systems-level transformation aimed at preparing graduates for a rapidly evolving workforce.
Most medical schools, however, have not kept pace. Instead of training students to apply modern tools toward clinical care, they continue to emphasize memorization — testing students on biochemical pathways and obscure facts rarely used in practice.
Early fears about plagiarism and declining academic rigor led many university departments to proceed cautiously after ChatGPT’s release in 2022. But since then, an increasing number of these educational institutions have shifted from policing AI to requiring faculty to incorporate GenAI into their coursework. And the American Federation of Teachers announced earlier this month that it would start an AI training hub for educators with $23 million from tech giants Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Medical education remains an outlier. A recent Educause study found that just 14% of medical schools have developed a formal GenAI curriculum, compared to 60% of undergraduate programs. Most medical school leaders and doctors still regard large language models as administrative aids rather than essential clinical tools.
This view is short-sighted. Within a few years, physicians will rely on generative AI to synthesize vast amounts of medical research, identify diagnostic patterns, and recommend treatment options tailored to the latest evidence. Patients will arrive at appointments already equipped with GenAI-assisted insights.
Used responsibly, generative AI can help prevent the 400,000 deaths each year from diagnostic errors, 250,000 deaths from preventable medical mistakes, and 500,000 deaths from poorly controlled chronic diseases. Elected officials and regulators need to support this life-saving approach.
How medical schools can catch up
In the past, medical students were evaluated on their ability to recall information. In the future, they will be judged by their ability to help AI-empowered patients manage chronic illnesses, prevent life-threatening disease complications, and maximize their health.
With generative AI capabilities doubling every year, matriculating medical students will be entering clinical practice equipped with tools over 30 times more powerful than today’s models. Yet few doctors will have received structured training on how to use them effectively.
Modernizing medical education starts with faculty training. Students entering medical school in 2025 will arrive already comfortable using generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Most instructors, however, will need to build that fluency.
To close this gap, academic leaders should provide faculty training programs before the start of the next academic year. These sessions would introduce educators to prompt engineering, output evaluation, and reliability assessment. These are foundational skills for teaching and applying GenAI in clinical scenarios.
Once faculty are prepared, schools would begin building case-based curricula that reflect modern clinical realities.
Sample Exercise: Managing chronic disease with GenAI support
In this scenario, students imagine seeing a 45-year-old man during a routine checkup. The patient has no prior medical problems, but on a physical exam, his blood pressure reads 140/100.
First, students walk through the traditional diagnostic process:
- What additional history would they obtain?
- Which physical findings warrant follow-up?
- What laboratory tests would they order?
- What treatment and follow-up plan would they recommend?
Next, they enter the same case into a generative AI tool and compare its output to their own. Where do they align? Where do they differ (and, importantly, why)?
Finally, students design a care plan that incorporates GenAI’s growing capabilities, such as:
- Analyzing data from at-home blood pressure monitors.
- Customizing educational guidance.
- Enabling patients to actively manage their chronic diseases between visits.
This type of training – integrated alongside traditional curriculum – prepares future clinicians to master not just the technology but also understand how it can be used to transform medical care.
A call to government: Empower the next generation of physicians
Medical schools can’t do this alone. Because most physician training is funded through federal grants and Medicare-supported residency programs, meaningful reform will require coordinated leadership from academic institutions, government agencies, and lawmakers.
Preparing future doctors to use GenAI safely and effectively should be treated as a national imperative. Medicare will need to fund new educational initiatives, and agencies like the FDA must streamline the approval process for GenAI-assisted clinical applications.
This month, the Trump administration encouraged U.S. companies and nonprofits to develop AI training programs for schools, educators, and students. Leading tech companies — including Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft — quickly signed on.
If medical school deans demonstrate similar openness to innovation, we can expect policymakers and industry leaders to invest in medical education, too.
But if medical educators and government leaders hesitate, for-profit companies and private equity firms will fill the void. And they will use GenAI not to improve patient care but primarily to increase margins and drive revenue.
As deans prepare to welcome the class of 2029 (and as lawmakers face the growing costs of American health care), they must ask themselves:
Are we preparing students to practice yesterday’s medicine or to lead tomorrow’s?
Dr. Robert Pearl, the author of “ ChatGPT, MD,” teaches at both the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.