Downvote. You really throw around that phrase "criminal offense" too much.

Penalties are certainly a mistake in the case of your statement, as you haven't really outlined any computerized diagnostic system that is accurate on the entire range of human maladies, is available to all, and that can account for all of the fuzziness of reporting symptoms (just to name a few obstacles).

But I can't see at all where you're coming from when you say criminal offense. This would suggest that doctors should be locked up?

A doctor who refuses to use such a system is putting the lives of his patients at risk. How is that acceptable?

By that logic, a doctor that doesn't try every possible remedy is putting his/her patients at risk, no? So you should throw a doctor in jail for refusing to consider blood-letting as an acceptable cure?

It might be unacceptable (although as I said, you haven't even made that case). But that's a long way away from being criminal behavior.

What do you mean by "use computers"?

I'm referring to using an officially mandated automated diagnosis system.

Does such a thing even exist? That sounds like a very hard problem.

Actually it does. It's fed with data that says: Condition X is usually caused by Y with Z% probability, etc etc.

Then you feed it all the symptoms, sometimes it asks questions, and gives you a list of causes sorted by probability.

It works almost exactly like this game http://www.guessthename.com/

Apparently the biggest problem with it is that doctors won't use it.

The second problem is feeding data - you basically have to parse every medical paper ever published.

Wait a second, if the system does in fact exist, and it works well, and the biggest problem is that doctors won't use it, I'm with amichail.

Guessing a name is a much simpler problem than guessing a disease. Can you point to any such systems for medical diagnoses?

Here's a paper on one (just a random one from google) http://www.med.univ-rennes1.fr/cerf/publi/ADM_index1.html

Here's a patent: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6607482.html

There are lots of a papers, and a small number of working prototypes, but I have not heard of any that are actually being used.

Something like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oXCm4N3J_M