Science of Skin Summit Talk Explores AI Changing the Patient-Physician Relationship in Longevity Medicine

Artificial intelligence may not replace physicians, but it is already changing the balance of knowledge between physicians and their patients, according to Hillary Lin, MD, Co-founder and CEO of CareCore.

Speaking at the Science of Skin Summit, Dr. Lin explored the intersection of AI and longevity medicine, arguing that increasingly sophisticated AI tools are giving highly motivated patients unprecedented ability to investigate their own health. For clinicians, she said, the appropriate response is not to resist that shift but to embrace the same technology to rethink how medicine can be practiced.

“You’ve probably all heard the statement that AI won’t replace doctors, that doctors who use AI will replace doctors who don’t use AI,” Dr. Lin said. “But one thing I’ve noticed is that more and more these days, clinicians are a lot of times getting replaced by patients who use AI.”

From “Manager Mode” to “Founder Mode”

Dr. Lin illustrated the potential for patient-driven medical investigation with examples of individuals who sought solutions beyond conventional pathways when faced with serious diseases.

One involved a technology executive with recurrent osteosarcoma who, after being told that he had exhausted available options and did not qualify for a clinical trial, assembled researchers to investigate his individual cancer and pursue a personalized treatment strategy.

Dr. Lin characterized the shift as moving from “manager mode”—selecting and coordinating the best options already available—to “founder mode,” in which a person actively searches for or develops options that were not previously on the table.

She also discussed physician-scientist David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, who was diagnosed with Castleman disease as a medical student and ultimately pursued research that led him to repurpose an existing therapy for his own disease.

Dr. Lin acknowledged that such examples involved unusual resources and circumstances. Her larger point, however, was about patient agency: AI can dramatically increase an individual's ability to access, synthesize, and interrogate medical information.

That capability aligns particularly closely with longevity medicine, she said, where patients may be seeking not simply to treat disease but to maximize health, performance, and quality of life over time.

AI as a New Baseline for Clinical Practice

Although concerns have emerged that reliance on AI could discourage independent thinking among medical trainees and clinicians, Lin proposed another way of looking at the technology: as a new baseline from which clinicians can expand their capabilities.

She encouraged clinicians to consider whether their own workflows have meaningfully changed as AI capabilities have advanced.

Patients have particularly strong incentives to investigate their own conditions, Dr. Lin noted. They live with the disease, understand their individual experience, and may spend considerably more time investigating a single condition than a clinician realistically can.

“We have the experience and the context to understand even more than our patients do,” Dr. Lin said. “But if we don’t accelerate along with them, we will start to look a bit stale, and we’ll fall behind the frontier.”

Rethinking the Medical Visit

Dr. Lin, who continues to see patients while also running an AI platform for longevity care, said her own practice illustrates how AI can support a fundamentally different model of care.

Longevity patients frequently arrive with large amounts of health information and ambitious objectives, she explained. Their questions may span supplements, peptides, red light therapy, exercise, and performance optimization while traditional medical priorities such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and family history must still be addressed.

As an example, Dr. Lin described an anonymized patient whose concerns encompassed hereditary cancer risk, an injury limiting exercise, cardiovascular and Alzheimer disease risk, autoimmune disease, perimenopause, and a history of migraines.

Rather than isolating one concern for a traditional short office visit, Lin approaches such cases more like complex projects.

She compared her workflow with a Kanban board used in project-management platforms such as Asana or Trello. Problems can be divided into those requiring active attention, those for which additional information is being gathered, and longer-term issues placed in a prevention-oriented backlog.

Workflow First, AI Tools Second

For practices interested in adopting AI, Dr. Lin cautioned against beginning with the question of which individual product to purchase.

The more important first step, she argued, is determining what an ideal clinical workflow would look like if previous technological constraints no longer applied. Only then should clinicians identify—or potentially build—the AI tools needed to support it.

Existing options already encompass clinical research, documentation and scribing, practice management, and other functions. But Dr. Lin encouraged physicians and practice leaders to become comfortable interacting with AI directly and even exploring tools that allow them to create customized systems.

Clinicians possess something technology developers may not: firsthand knowledge of how medicine should ideally be delivered. Practice owners similarly understand the operational workflows that determine whether a new system succeeds in the real world.

For Dr. Lin, that combination creates an opportunity extending beyond making existing medical tasks faster. AI could allow physicians to reconsider how those tasks are organized in the first place.

For clinicians who have long wished there were a better way to practice medicine, Lin said, “this is your moment.”