Practicing in the Age of AI: Essays on Medicine, Meaning, and Machines

AI is already in the exam room. Are you ready?

Artificial intelligence has entered clinical practice - quietly, rapidly, and with consequences no physician fully anticipated. It sits behind the documentation tools that auto-populate your notes, the imaging algorithms flagging findings before you do, the insurance decision engines that approve or deny your orders. Medicine has changed. The question is whether physicians will shape that change - or simply adapt to it.

In Practicing in the Age of AI: Essays on Medicine, Meaning, and Machines, physician leader and essayist Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA, CPE, DFAAPL, takes readers inside the transformation - not as a technologist, futurist, or alarmist, but as a clinician who has watched AI reshape the very fabric of medical practice.

This isn't a guide to the best AI tools. It's a framework for thinking about what AI means for the physicians who use them - their clinical reasoning, their documentation, their professional identity, and their accountability to patients.

Across 36 essays organized into four sections, Lazarus examines:

• How AI is transforming medical writing, documentation, and clinical language - and what gets lost in translation.
• Why physicians risk becoming editors of machine-generated work they didn't create and aren't sure they should sign.
• Where AI promises efficiency but delivers automation bias, hallucinated documentation, and algorithmic inequity.
• What physician leaders must demand from AI governance, FDA oversight, prior authorization systems, and health system design.
• How to preserve clinical judgment, moral responsibility, and the human core of medicine in a machine-assisted world.

With intellectual range, narrative skill, and the balanced skepticism of a seasoned clinician, Lazarus occupies the nuanced middle ground: neither dismissing AI's promise nor surrendering to its hype. His essays give physicians the language and conceptual tools to participate in AI conversations with precision, lead institutional decision-making with confidence, and protect what patients need most - a physician who still thinks, judges, and cares.

Whether you are a practicing clinician encountering AI in daily workflow, a physician executive navigating technology adoption, or a medical educator preparing the next generation, this book offers the reflective framework today's physicians need.