FT: Clinicians Push Back on Medical AI Beyond Diagnostics

Clinicians are pushing back on medical AI's expansion beyond diagnostics and imaging, the Financial Times reported on 20 September, arguing that the clinical and performance data supporting broader effectiveness is limited. Sarah Neville's piece, per Techmeme's summary, has clinicians expressing skepticism about applications beyond established diagnostic and imaging uses, and notes that technology advances have not yet translated into significant real-life improvements in patient care.

The complaint sits against a specific survey backdrop from earlier this year. Wolters Kluwer's 2026 Future Ready Healthcare survey, conducted with Ipsos among 355 US doctors and nurses between 11 and 14 March, flagged four top clinical AI risks: advertiser-driven bias (72%), deskilling (74%), hallucinations (74%), and low governance awareness (27%). The report describes the deskilling concern as "an increasing overreliance on AI tools that reduce clinicians' skills and ability to independently identify inaccuracies or poor recommendations."

Awareness of formal AI governance policies at healthcare organisations rose only "from 21% in 2025 to a still modest 27% in 2026." 77% of clinicians said they double-check AI answers against original sources or trusted databases such as PubMed or UpToDate, and 53% want AI to be required to show the reasoning behind its responses. Physicians' repeated daily AI use tripled between 2025 and 2026, Healthcare Dive noted reading the same data.

The FT's framing, per Techmeme, is that the objection concerns missing evidence for broader deployments, not a rejection of AI in medicine as such.