A dialectical lens for AI and medical humanities: advancing responsible augmented humanism in Digital Public Health

Artificial intelligence (AI) creates profound dialectical tensions between technological empowerment and ethical risk in healthcare, challenging the humanistic core of medicine while offering new tools for equity. This thematic mini-review through a dialectical lens-operationalized as Sinicized Marxist dialectics-to unpack structural contradictions in AI-healthcare integration. Unlike standard bioethics or Digital Public Health (DPH) frameworks alone, this analytical tool reveals systemic power asymmetries and inequities overlooked in existing scholarship. We further integrate the Healthcare 5.0 framework and intersectional AI ethics to move beyond abstract group-based fairness toward actionable equity. The core contribution of this review is the development of the responsible augmented humanism (RAH) framework, a human-centric model operationalized across three dimensions, AI design, medical education, and multi-stakeholder governance. RAH explicitly links humanistic values to DPH principles with measurable indicators for real-world implementation. This mini-review provides a theoretically grounded, evidence-based roadmap for aligning AI innovation with humanistic care and population health equity in the AI era.