ABOUT

Why Loading Dose exists

Almost everything written about AI in medicine is written for investors, engineers, or hospital executives. Very little is written for the people who will use these tools with a patient in front of them. Loading Dose is for them, by one of them.

One email every Monday. Five minutes. What changed this week, what the evidence shows, and one thing worth trying before your next shift.

Who it's for

Anyone who sees patients. Physicians, residents, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, CRNAs. I'm an anesthesiologist, so I'll notice perioperative news first, but the newsletter covers every specialty. If a tool changes how a primary care doc runs clinic, it runs here.

How I use AI myself

I'm not writing about this from the outside. I use AI every working day.

Inside the hospital, it's the AI built into our electronic health record. The current version summarizes a patient's history for me, so I walk into the pre-op interview already oriented instead of scrolling through years of notes. That's the only place patient information and AI meet, and it lives entirely within the system the hospital already runs and governs.

Outside the record, I use AI to learn. I'll take a de-identified teaching case or a scenario from the literature and see how it reasons through the problem, where it's sharp, and where it's confidently wrong. It doesn't touch my decisions for the patient in front of me. And I use it to keep up with the evidence, which nobody can do by hand anymore.

I follow the policies of my hospital and my group on all of this without exception. If you try anything from the how-to sections, check your organization's approved-tool list first. That will be a recurring theme.

How each issue gets made

Articles come from a fixed list of journals, regulatory feeds, and a few trade outlets. Each one is scored on three things: can a clinician act on it within a week, how strong is the evidence, and is it new. I pick the final five to seven by hand every Saturday.

AI helps me gather and draft. I read every source, edit every sentence, and put my name on the result. When I don't know something, the issue says so.

What I won't do

No sponsored editorial. No press-release reprints. If the evidence is weak, the issue says so. If a conflict of interest ever arises, it will be disclosed in the issue where it matters.

About the author

I'm Ed Seugling. I trained in chemistry at Boston College, went to medical school at New Jersey Medical School, and did my anesthesiology residency at Yale New Haven Hospital. I've practiced for over twenty years, first at a level one trauma center in Delaware and currently in Dallas-Fort Worth, where I work at a large county hospital and serve as director of education for the anesthesiology department.

I'm a general anesthesiologist. I never subspecialized, which turns out to be useful here: I don't have a niche to defend, and I spend all day next to surgeons, nurses, and residents from every corner of the hospital.

Loading Dose is a side project. I pay for it myself and write it on weekends. The opinions are mine and don't represent my employer or any institution I'm affiliated with.

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