Can AI finally wrap women in the mantle of proper healthcare?

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never read Hilary Mantel. There. I’ve said it. Maybe confession is good for the soul?

I’ve been prompted over the years by my extremely well-read sister and cousin, as well as my late mother, to give Mantel a whirl, but there has always been a new biography that piques my interest and snares my attention.

Recently, however, two things caused me to put Wolf Hall back on the top of the ‘to read’ pile. Firstly, a small hamlet in Derbyshire called Glossop. A former factory mill town where, to use Mantel’s words, “Pennine fogs rolled in to meet industrial smog”, Glossop is the place I currently call home. Today, Glossop is a sleepy walking paradise where green fields give way to regimented rows of stone and slate-roofed terraced houses held together with plaster board and 1970s-inspired woodchip wallpaper. Mantel, so I’ve been told on more than one occasion, was born in Glossop and raised in nearby Hadfield. Maybe we have walked the same hills or slipped on the same cobblestones?

The other nudge was delivered by the excellent observer of life and womanhood, Nina Stibbe. In her book Went to London, Took the Dog, Stibbe berates anyone who has not yet discovered the magic of ?Mantel.

Duly chastened I located a book of Mantel’s own reflections, A Memoir of My Former Self. This scratched both my insatiable hunger for biographies and autobiographies and gave me an opportunity to ‘see what I was in for’ in terms of highbrow intellectualism. It was, quite simply, sublime. Elegant. Crafted. Intense. I can’t believe I waited so long.

One recollection shared in this memoir concerns Mantel’s life-long struggle with endometriosis, a painful – often excruciating and debilitating - condition where a type of uterine tissue grows outside a woman’s uterus (seemingly the definition is still rather vague). In a 2004 article written for The Guardian newspaper, Mantel wrote how her “frequent gut-ache” was blamed on “everything from constitutional nervousness to school dinners”, a low-pain threshold or depression and anxiety. It was only in her late 20s, after being written off by doctor after doctor, that the cause was eventually given a name following a surgery that removed part of her bladder and bowel, along with her womb and ovaries. “I woke up to a strange future,” she wrote, “childlessness, a premature menopause, and a marriage, already tottering, that would soon fall apart.”

With more than one woman in my family suffering from this infliction, Mantel’s experience in the 1970s-1980s boiled my blood. My own kin fought this never-ending battle far more recently and often with the same indifferent care and scant support. Just another indication, if you needed reminding, that women’s health is often misunderstood, disregarded or just plain ignored. Not just by male doctors, but by female professionals as well.

So, what’s to be done about it? Or do we just limp on for another millennium?

Right now, the world stands on a technological precipice where humankind has a deliberate choice to make between harnessing the power of large language models and generative artificial intelligence (AI) to come up with new perfume fragrances or generate (yet more) fake news, or to focus our collective efforts on solving real-world problems like those set out in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. AI might just be the turning point women need to finally create an equitable healthcare system.

Unlike a large chunk of the world currently I have not yet nailed my mast to the AI wall. Sure I use it for transcriptions and the occasional grammar check – I don’t like in a cave! - but I still prefer to do my own thinking, thank you. It prickles me to have AI forced down my throat during a Google search or as some ever-present WhatsApp fix. Yes, it’s a bit Grinch-like to write off the development of all weird and wacky AI applications, but given the excessive environmental resources associated with animating a photograph or checking if your cat’s tail swish means they are having a bad day, I argue that we could be more mindful about how we leverage the technology’s gargantuan potential. ?

AI could, however, prove a defining moment for women’s health. That is, if it’s managed correctly and the same bias inherent in human consultations is ironed out of AI tools before they are launched on the unsuspecting public.

In a recent speech in which he proclaimed the UK’s push towards becoming an AI superpower, UK Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer referenced the story of a prison officer and sports instructor who suffered a stroke. The woman was quickly rushed to hospital where doctors tasked AI with determining the precise location of the blood clot in her brain. Within three minutes the clot had been removed. As Starmer, rightly, gushed: “That’s the power of AI in action.”

While AI has a strong role to play in healthcare in the future, it remains to be seen if AI can do the same for women’s health.

If the technology can (with doula-like insight) guide women through the pimples of puberty, the strains of menstruation, pregnancy or fertility woes, pain and the delights of both peri and menopause, then I might – just might – be converted.