[HN Gopher] My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
___________________________________________________________________
My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
Author : kieto
Score : 106 points
Date : 2026-01-29 18:45 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (restofworld.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (restofworld.org)
| wnissen wrote:
| This was not what I was expecting. The doctors I know are mostly
| miserable; stuck between the independence but also the burden of
| running their own practice, or or else working for a giant health
| system and having no control over their own days. You can see how
| an LLM might be preferable, especially when managing a chronic,
| degenerative condition. I have a family member with stage 3
| kidney disease who sees a nephrologist, and there's nothing you
| can actually do. No one in their right mind would recommend a
| kidney transplant, let alone dialysis for someone with moderately
| impaired kidneys. All you can do is treat the symptoms as they
| come up and monitor for significant drops in function.
| mhl47 wrote:
| Worriesome for sure.
|
| However I would say that the cited studies are somewhat outdated
| already compared e.g. with GPT-5-Thinking doing 2mins of
| reasoning/search about a medical question. As far as I know
| Deepseeks search capabilities are not comparable and non of the
| models in the study spend a comparable amount of compute
| answering your specific question.
| nsjdkdkdk wrote:
| How much nvidia u holding bro
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I think the article can basically be summed up as "GenAI
| sychophancy should have a health warning similar to social
| media". It's a helluva drug to be constantly rewarded and
| flattered by an algorithm.
| koshergweilo wrote:
| I think that's doing the article a disservice. "Some patients
| prefer the service of AI doctors to real doctors, even though
| they definitely do get a lot wrong" is what I got out of it.
|
| Personally I think the article spends a lot of time trying to
| show that AI may be able to improve health outcomes,
| particulaly for rural patients, but IMHO it doesn't spend
| nearly enough time talking about the current challenges
| snitzr wrote:
| A sick family member told me something along the lines of, "I
| know how to work with AI to get the answer." I interpret that to
| mean he asks it questions until it tells him what he wants to
| hear.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Indeed, real doctors have the advantage of understanding how to
| treat humans that are incapacitated. =3
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU
| wvbdmp wrote:
| Just seeing that guy's face and hearing his voice makes me
| uneasy. That channel is total body-horror. Glad that guy
| ended up okay, unlike this poor soul:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=NJ7M01jV058
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Indeed, the instinctual pucker factor for some things in
| this world are warranted. That case is famous, and still
| controversial to those with inflated hubris. =3
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| The dangers are obvious (and also there are some fascinating
| insights into how healthcare works practically in China). I
| wonder if some kind of "second opinion" antagonistic approach
| might reduce the risks.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Medical Advice Generative Adversarial Networks would be a good
| idea.
|
| I see some of this adversarial second-guessing introspection
| from Claude sometimes. ("But wait. I just said x y and z, but
| that's inconsistent with this other thing. Let me rethink
| that.")
|
| Sometimes when I get the sense that an LLM is too sycophantic,
| I'll instruct it to steelman the counter-argument, then assess
| the persuasiveness of that counter-argument. It helps.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Can you expand on the insights into the chinese medical system
| ?
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I hadn't really even seen much in the way of recent, first /
| second person accounts of what it's like to receive chronic
| care in modern China. It's sad but maybe not surprising to
| see that it's dysfunctional in its own special way.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| This almost certainly isn't only a China problem. I've observed
| UK users asking questions about diabetes and other health advice.
| We also have an inexpensive (free-at-point of use for most stuff)
| but stretched healthcare system. Doubtless there are US users
| looking at the cost of their healthcare and resorting to ChatGPT
| instead too.
|
| In companies people talk about Shadow-IT happening when IT
| doesn't cover the user needs. We should probably label this stuff
| Shadow-Health.
|
| To some extent, the deployment of a publicly funded AI health
| chat bot, where the responses can be analysed by healthcare
| professionals to at least prevent future harm is probably
| significantly less bad than telling people not to ask AI
| questions and consult the existing stretched infrastructure.
| Because people will ask the questions regardless.
| threetonesun wrote:
| The joke of looking symptoms up on WebMD and determining you
| have cancer has been around for... geez over 20 years now.
| Anti-vaccine sentiment mostly derived from Facebook. Google any
| symptom today and there are about 10 million Quora-esque
| websites of "doctors" answering questions. I'm not sure that
| funneling all of this into the singular UI of an AI interface
| is really better or worse or even all that different.
|
| But I do agree that some focused and well funded public health
| bot would be ideal, although we'll need the WHO to do it, it's
| certainly not coming from the US any time soon.
| margorczynski wrote:
| The problem is not reliance on AI but that the AI is not ready
| yet and using general-purpose models.
|
| There isn't simply enough doctors to go around and the average
| one isn't as knowledgeable as you would want. Everything suggests
| that when it comes to diagnosis ML systems should be better in
| the long run on average.
|
| Especially with a quickly aging population there is no
| alternative if we want people to have healthcare on a sensible
| level.
| HPsquared wrote:
| They really have arrived just in time, I think.
| guywithahat wrote:
| > At the bot's suggestion, she reduced the daily intake of
| immunosuppressant medication her doctor prescribed her and
| started drinking green tea extract. She was enthusiastic about
| the chatbot
|
| I don't know enough about medicine to say whether or not this is
| correct, but it sounds suspect. I wouldn't be surprised if
| chatbots, in an effort to make people happy, start recommending
| more and more nonsense natural remedies as time goes on. AI is
| great for injuries and illnesses, but I wonder if this is just
| the answer she wants, and not the best answer.
| cube00 wrote:
| As soon as the model detects user pleasure at not needing a
| scary surgery (especially if you already confided that you're
| scared) then it'll double down on that line to please the user.
| abhisuri97 wrote:
| med student here: Reducing immunosuppressant not something to
| be taken lightly for kidney transplant patients. I was shocked
| when I read that sentence.
| kingstnap wrote:
| > she said she was aware that DeepSeek had given her
| contradictory advice. She understood that chatbots were trained
| on data from across the internet, she told me, and did not
| represent an absolute truth or superhuman authority
|
| With highly lucid people like the author's mom I'm not too
| worried about Dr. Deepseek. I'm actually incredibly bullish on
| the fact that AI models are, as the article describes,
| superhumanly empathetic. They are infinitely patient, infinitely
| available, and unbelievably knowledgeable, it really is
| miraculous.
|
| We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there
| are obviously a lot of people who really cannot handle the
| seductivity of things that agree with them like this.
|
| I do think there is pretty good potential in making good progress
| on this front in though. Especially given the level of care and
| effort being put into making chatbots better for medical uses and
| the sheer number of smart people working on the problem.
| atoav wrote:
| Well yes, but as an extremely patient person I can tell you
| that infinite patience doesn't come without its own problems.
| In certain social situations the ethically better thing to do
| is to actually to lose your patience, may it be to shake the
| person talking to you up, may it be to indicate they are going
| down a wrong path or whatnot.
|
| I have experience with building systems to remove that infinite
| patience from chatbots and it does make interactions much more
| realistic.
| HPsquared wrote:
| If the computer is the bicycle of the mind, GenAI is a motor
| vehicle. Very powerful and transformative, but it's also
| possible to get into trouble.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| A stark difference with that analogy is that with a bicycle,
| the human is still doing quite a bit of work themselves. The
| bicycle amplifies the human effort, whereas with a motor
| vehicle, the vehicle _replaces_ the human effort entirely.
|
| No strong opinion on if that's good or bad long term, as
| humans have been outsourcing portions of their thinking for a
| really long time, but it's interesting to think about.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > They are infinitely patient, infinitely available, and
| unbelievably knowledgeable, it really is miraculous.
|
| This is a strange way to talk about a computer program
| following its programming. I see no miracle here.
| turtletontine wrote:
| I feel like I've seen more and more people recently fall for
| this trick. No, LLMs are not "empathetic" or "patient", and
| no, they do not have emotions. They're incredibly huge piles
| of numbers following their incentives. Their behavior
| convincingly reproduces human behavior, and they express what
| looks like human emotions... because their training data is
| full of humans expressing emotions? Sure, sometimes it's
| helpful for their outputs to exhibit a certain affect or
| "personality". But falling for the act, and really
| attributing human emotions to them seems, is alarming to me.
| guntars wrote:
| There's no trick. It's less about what actually is going on
| inside the machine and more about the experience the human
| has. From that lens, yes, they are empathetic.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Access trumps everything else. A doctor is fine with you dying
| while you wait on his backlog. The machine will give you some
| wrong answers. The mother in the story seems to be balancing the
| concerns. She has become the agent of her own life empowered by a
| supernatural machine.
|
| > _She understood that chatbots were trained on data from across
| the internet, she told me, and did not represent an absolute
| truth or superhuman authority. She had stopped eating the lotus
| seed starch it had recommended._
|
| The "there's wrong stuff there" fear has existed for the
| Internet, Google, StackOverflow. Each time people adapted. They
| will adapt again. Human beings have remarkable ability to use
| tools.
| reenorap wrote:
| I and many of my friends have used ChatGPT extremely effectively
| to diagnose medical issues. In fact, I would say that ChatGPT is
| better than most doctors because most doctors don't actually
| listen to you. ChatGPT took the time to ask me questions and
| based on my answers, narrowed down a particularly scary diagnosis
| and gave excellent instructions on how to get to a local hospital
| in a foreign country, what to ask for, and that I didn't have to
| worry very much because it sounded very typical for what I had.
| The level of reassurance that I was doing everything right
| actually made me feel less scared, because it was a pretty
| serious problem. Everything it told me was 100% correct and it
| guided me perfectly.
|
| I was taking one high blood pressure medication but then noticed
| my blood sugar jumped. I did some research with ChatGPT and it
| found a paper that did indicate that it could raise blood sugar
| levels and gave me a recommendation for an alternative I asked my
| doctor about it and she said I was wrong, but I gently pushed her
| to switch and gave the recommended medication. She obliged, which
| is why I have kept her for almost 30 years now, and lo and
| behold, my blood sugar did drop.
|
| Most people have a hard time pushing back against doctors and
| doctors mostly work with blinders on and don't listen. ChatGPT
| gives you the ability to keep asking questions without thinking
| you are bothering them.
|
| I think ChatGPT is a great advance in terms of medical help in my
| opinion and I recommend it to everyone. Yes, it might make
| mistakes and I caution everyone to be careful and don't trust it
| 100%, but I say that about human doctors as well.
| ZhadruOmjar wrote:
| ChatGPT for health questions is the best use case I have found
| (Claude wins for code). Having a scratch pad where I can ask
| about any symptom I might feel, using project memory to cross
| reference things and having someone actually listen is very
| helpful. I asked about Crohn's disease since my grandfather
| suffered from it and I got a few tests I could do, stats on
| likelihood based on genetics, diet ideas to try and questions
| to ask the doctor. Much better than the current doc experience
| which is get the quickest review of my bloods, told to exercise
| and eat healthy and a see you in six months.
| jamespo wrote:
| And why should anyone trust you?
| dang wrote:
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful. They include: " _Have curious conversation; don 't
| cross-examine._" and " _Assume good faith._ "
|
| HN is just a big internet watercooler type place where people
| exchange experiences, views, and whatnot. Such a context
| can't really work unless people assume good faith with each
| other.
| cal_dent wrote:
| I've heard many people say the same (specifically about ppl
| being better than doctors because they listen) and I find it
| odd and wonder if this is a specific country thing?
|
| I've been lucky enough to not need much beyond relative minor
| medical help but in the places I've lived always found that
| when I do see a GP they're generally helpful.
|
| There's also something here about medical stuff making people
| feel vulnerable as a default so feeling heard can
| overcompensate the relationship? Not sure I'm articulating this
| last point well but it comes up so frequent (it listened,
| guided me through it step by step etc.) that I wonder if that
| has an effect. Feeling more in control than a doctor who has
| other patients and time constraint just say it's x or do this
| Projectiboga wrote:
| In America a side effect of our lack of universal care is
| that every physician has to carry their own malpractice
| insurance, whereas in most countries you can just get
| retreated if the first time doesn't work. The Dr might still
| face consequences is their was actual malpractice but there
| isn't the shakels of having to do it by the book so strictly.
| avree wrote:
| No, no, no. You can change your doctor, and get one that
| listens to you - you can't change the fact that ChatGPT has no
| skin in the game - no reputation, no hippocratic oath, no
| fiscal/legal responsibility. Some people have had miracles with
| Facebook groups, or WebMD, but that doesn't change where the
| role of a doctor is or mean that you should be using those
| things for medical advice as opposed to something that allows
| you to have an informed conversation with a doctor.
| noosphr wrote:
| Neither do most doctors. No gp will get disbarred for giving
| the wrong diagnosis on a first consult.
|
| They have 15 minutes and you have very finite money.
|
| Medical agents should be a pre consult tool that the patient
| talks to in the lobby while waiting for the doctor so the
| doctor doesn't waste an hour to hear the most important data
| point and the patient doesn't sit for an hour in the lobby
| doing nothing.
| raincole wrote:
| Doctors have no skin in the game too. Our society is built on
| the illusion of 'skin in the game' of professionals like
| doctors and lawyers (and to a lesser extent, engineers), but
| it's still an illusion.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > no reputation, no hippocratic oath, no fiscal/legal
| responsibility.
|
| To say nothing of giving your personal health information
| over to a private company with no requirement to practice
| HIPAA, and just recently got subpoenaed for all chat records.
| Not to mention potential future government requests, NSA
| letters, during an administration that has a health secretary
| openly talking about rounding up mentally ill people and
| putting them in work camps.
|
| Maybe LLMs have use here, but we absolutely should not be
| encouraging folks to plug information into public chatbots
| that they do not control and do not run locally.
|
| It is a recipe for disaster.
| derefr wrote:
| In countries with public healthcare + doctor shortages (e.g.
| Canada), good luck even getting _a_ family doctor, let alone
| having a request to _switch_ you family doctor "when you
| already have one!" get taken seriously.
|
| Everyone I know just goes to walk-in clinics / urgent-care
| centres. And neither of those options give doctors any "skin
| in the game." Or any opportunities for follow-up. Or any
| ongoing context for evaluating treatment outcomes of chronic
| conditions, with metrics measured across yearly checkups. Or
| the "treatment workflow state" required to ever prescribe
| anything that's not a first-line treatment for a disease. Or,
| for that matter, the willingness to believe you when you say
| that your throat infection is not in fact viral, because
| you've had symptoms continuously for four months already, and
| this was just the first time you had enough time and energy
| to wake up at 6AM so you could wait out in front of the
| clinic at 7:30AM before the "first-come-first-served" clinic
| fills up its entire patient queue for the day.
| 3rodents wrote:
| I agree that absolute deference to doctors is a mistake and
| that individuals should be encouraged to advocate for
| themselves (and doctors should be receptive to it) but I'm not
| so convinced in this specific case. Why do high blood sugar
| levels matter? Are there side effects associated with the
| alternative treatment? Has ChatGPT actually helped you in a
| meaningful way, or has the doctor's eventual relenting made you
| feel like progress has been made, even if that change is not
| meaningful?
|
| In this context, I think of ChatGPT as a many-headed Redditor
| (after all, reddit is what ChatGPT is trained on) and think
| about the information as if it was a well upvoted comment on
| Reddit. If you had come across a thread on Reddit with the same
| information, would you have made the same push for a change?
|
| There are quite a few subreddits for specific medical
| conditions that provide really good advice, and there are
| others where the users are losing their minds egging each other
| on in weird and whacky beliefs. Doctors are far from perfect,
| doctors are often wrong, but ChatGPT's sycophancy and a
| desperate patient's willingness to treat cancer with fruit feel
| like a bad mix. How do we avoid being egged on by ChatGPT into
| forcing doctors to provide bad care? That's not a rhetorical
| question, curious about your thoughts as an advocate for
| ChatGPT.
| yunohn wrote:
| > Why do high blood sugar levels matter?
|
| Are you asking why a side effect that is actually an entire
| health problem on its own, is a problem? Especially when
| there is a replacement that doesn't cause it?
| 3rodents wrote:
| Side effects do not exist in isolation. High blood sugar is
| not a problem if it is solving a much bigger health issue,
| or is a lesser side effect than something more serious. If
| medication A causes high blood sugar but medication B has a
| chance of causing blood clots, medication A is an obvious
| choice. If a patient gets it in their head that their high
| blood sugar is a problem to solve, ChatGPT is going to
| reinforce that, whereas a doctor will have a much better
| understanding of the tradeoffs for that patient. The doctor
| version of the x/y problem.
| yunohn wrote:
| Look, anyone can argue hypotheticals. But if one reads
| the comment being discussed, it can be deduced that your
| proposed hypotheses are not applicable, and that the
| doctor actually acknowledged the side effect and changed
| medications leading to relief. Now, if the new medication
| has a more serious side effect, the doctor (or ChatGPT)
| should mention and/or monitor for it, but the parent has
| not stated that is the case (yet). As such, we do not
| need to invent any scenarios.
| 3rodents wrote:
| The comment being discussed advocates for people to use
| ChatGPT and push their doctor to follow its
| recommendations. Even if we assume the OP is an average
| representation of people in their life, that means half
| of the people they are recommending ChatGPT to for
| medical advice are not going to be interrogating the
| information it provides.
|
| A lazy doctor combined with a patient that lacks a clear
| understanding of how ChatGPT works and how to use it
| effectively could have disastrous results. A lazy doctor
| following the established advice for a condition by
| prescribing a medication that causes high blood sugar is
| orders of magnitude less dangerous than a lazy doctor who
| gives in to a crackpot medical plan that the patient has
| come up with using ChatGPT without the rigour described
| by the comment we are discussing.
|
| Spend any amount of time around people with chronic
| health conditions (online or offline) and you'll realise
| just how much damage could be done by encouraging them to
| use ChatGPT. Not because they are idiots but because they
| are desperate.
| Calavar wrote:
| As a physician, I can give further insight. The blood
| pressure medication the commenter is referring to is
| almost certainly a beta blocker. The effect on blood
| sugar levels is generally modest [1]. (It is rare to
| advise someone with diabetes to stop taking beta
| blockers, as opposed to say emphysema, where it is
| common)
|
| They can be used for isolated, treatment of high blood
| pressure, but they are also used for dual treatment of
| blood pressure and various heart issues (heart failure,
| stable angina, arrhythmias). If you have heart failure,
| beta blockers can reduce your relative annual mortality
| risk by about 25%.
|
| I would not trust an LLM to weigh the pros and cons
| appropriately knowing their syncophantic tendencies. I
| suspect they are going to be biased toward agreeing with
| whatever concerns the user initially expresses to them.
|
| [1]
| emodendroket wrote:
| I know what you mean and I would certainly not want to
| blindly "trust" AI chatbots with any kind of medical plan.
| But they are very helpful at giving you some threads to pull
| on for researching. I do think they tend a little toward
| giving you potentially catastrophic, worst-case
| possibilities, but that's a known effect from when people
| were using Google and WebMD as well.
| alexjplant wrote:
| > most doctors don't actually listen to you.
|
| > doctors mostly work with blinders on and don't listen
|
| This has unfortunately been my experience as well. My childhood
| PCP was great but every interaction I've had with the
| healthcare system since has been some variation of this.
| Reading blood work incorrectly, ignoring explanations of
| symptoms, misremembering medications you've been taking,
| prescribing inappropriate medications, etc. The worst part is
| that there are a _lot_ of people that reflexively dismiss you
| as a contrarian asshole or, even worse, a member of a reviled
| political group that you have nothing to do with just because
| you dare to point out that The Person With A Degree In Medicine
| makes glaring objective mistakes.
|
| Doctors aren't immune to doing a bad job. I don't think it's a
| secret that the system overworks them and causes many of them
| to treat patients like JIRA tickets - I'd just like to know
| what it would take for people to realize that saying such
| doesn't make you a crackpot.
|
| As an aside I use Claude primarily for research when
| investigating medical issues, not to diagnose. It is equally
| likely to hallucinate or mischaracterize in the medical domain
| as it is others.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I don't know if I could trust AI for big things, but I had
| nagging wrist pain for like a year, any time I extended my
| wrist (like while doing a pushup). It wasn't excruciating but
| it certainly wasn't pleasant, and it stopped me from doing
| certain activities (like pushups)
|
| I visited my GP, 2 wrist specialists, and physical therapist to
| help deal with it. I had multiple x rays and an MRI done.
| Steroid injection done. All without relief. My last wrist
| specialist even recommended I just learn to accept it and don't
| try to extend my wrist too much.
|
| I decided to ask Gemini, and literally the first thing it
| suggested was maybe the way I was using the mouse was inflaming
| an extensor muscle, and it suggested changing my mouse and a
| stretch/massage.
|
| And you know what, the next day I had no wrist pain for the
| first day in a year. And it's been that way for about 3 weeks
| now, so I'm pretty hopeful it isn't short term
| Marsymars wrote:
| I guess it's not nothing that Gemini caught that, but that
| seems like a pretty obvious oversight from the healthcare
| practitioners - inquiring about RSI injuries should be one of
| the first things they ask about.
|
| I pre-emptively switched to trackballs and to alternating
| left/right hands for mousing near the start of my
| professional career based on the reading I did after some
| mild wrist strain.
| mapt wrote:
| I think that 90% of what we get from doctors on
| musculoskeletal injuries that aren't visible on a simple
| X-ray is either oversight, or a bias towards doing nothing
| specifically because treatments have health,
| administrative, and financial costs and they might not
| help. There is no time authorized to do deep diagnostic
| work unless something is clearly killing you.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I've had good results with doctors for soft tissue
| injuries, but it doesn't feel like something that GPs are
| generally equipped/motivated for. The good results I've
| had have been from doctors at high performance sports
| clinics, or with doctors I've been referred to by my
| (awesome) sports physiotherapist.
| code_biologist wrote:
| I had progressively worsening pelvic floor pain issues that
| AI helped me with and are now in remission/repair. My
| decade of interaction with multiple urologists and
| clinicians could be characterized as repeated and
| consistent "pretty obvious oversight from the healthcare
| practitioners".
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| I was having wrist pain from using the mouse, and switched to
| a trackball, issue solved, if the wrist doesn't move/flex, it
| doesn't get strained, therefore no pain.
|
| The only thing that moves is my thumb, and it's much better
| for flexing than the wrist, also it has a tiny load to manage
| vs the wrist.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I did the same, though to non-thumb trackball (CST2545),
| which I find also virtually eliminates wrist stress.
| cm2012 wrote:
| +100 to this from my personal experience
| gaoshan wrote:
| ChatGPT helped me understand a problem with my stomach that
| multiple doctors and numerous tests have not been able to shed
| any effective light on. Essentially I plugged in all of the
| data I could from my own observations of my issue over a 35
| year period. It settled on these 3 possibilities: "Functional
| Dyspepsia with slow gastric accommodation, Mild delayed gastric
| emptying (even subclinical), Visceral hypersensitivity (your
| nerves fire pain signals when stretched)" and suggested a
| number of strategies to help with this. I implemented many of
| them and my stomach pain has been non-existent for months
| now... longer than I have ever been pain free.
|
| I feel like the difference is that doctors took what I told
| them and only partially listened. They never took it especially
| seriously and just went straight to standard tests and
| treatments (scopes, biopsies and various stomach acid impacting
| medications). ChatGPT took some of what I said and actually
| considered it, discounting some things and digging into others
| (I said that bitter beer helped... doctor laughed at that,
| ChatGPT said that the alcohol probably did not help but that
| the bittering agent might and it was correct). ChatGPT got me
| somewhere better than where I was previously... something no
| doctor was able to do.
| Thoreandan wrote:
| Reminds me of an excellent paper I just read by a former Google
| DeepMind Ethics Research Team member
|
| https://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/114/1/4 - Reinecke, Madeline G.,
| et al. "The double-edged sword of anthropomorphism in llms."
| Proceedings. Vol. 114. No. 1. MDPI, 2025 Author:
| https://www.mgreinecke.com/
| adzm wrote:
| Considering how difficult it is to get patients to talk to
| doctors, using AI can be a great way to get some suggestions and
| insight _and then present that to your actual doctor_
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Patients talking to doctors is the easy part. Doctors actually
| listening to anything they don't already think is nearly
| impossible.
| delichon wrote:
| I prepared for a new patient appointment with a medical
| specialist last week by role playing the conversation with a
| chatbot. The bot turned out to be much more responsive,
| inquisitive and helpful. The doctor was passive, making no
| suggestions, just answering questions. I had to prompt him
| explicitly to get to therapy recommendations, unlike the AI. I
| was glad that I had learned enough from the bot to ask useful
| questions. It would have been redundant if the doctor was active
| and interested, but that can't be depended on. This is standard
| procedure for me now.
| heisenbit wrote:
| For major medical issues it may well be best practice to use the
| four eyes principle like we do for all safety related systems.
| Access is key and at this time getting a second pair of eyes in
| close timely proximity is a luxury few have and even fewer will
| have looking at the demographics in the developed world. Human
| doctors are failable as is AI. For the time being having a
| multitude of perspectives may well be the best in most cases.
| alexpotato wrote:
| The big bank phrase for "four eyes" was "maker/checker" and I
| always enjoyed that it rhymed.
|
| You are 100% correct that, much like pilots overseeing
| autopilots, we should combine the best of both worlds in the
| medical field.
| zzzoom wrote:
| If you get the "You're absolutely right!" response from an LLM
| that screwed up on a field you're familiar with and still let
| them play with your health, you're...courageous to say the least.
| repiret wrote:
| I'm reminded of the monologue from Terminator 2:
|
| > Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The
| Terminator would never stop, it would never leave him... it would
| always be there. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him
| or get drunk and hit him, or say it couldn't spend time with him
| because it was too busy. And it would die to protect him. Of all
| the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this
| thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an
| insane world, it was the sanest choice.
|
| The AI doctor will always have enough time for you, and always be
| at the top of their game with you. It becomes useful when it
| works better than an overworked midlevel, not when it competes
| with the best doctor on their best day. If we're not there
| already, we're darn close.
| alexpotato wrote:
| One of my kids recently had a no-contact knee injury while
| playing basketball. He immediately started limping and crying and
| I had to carry him from the court to the car.
|
| I did some searching with Grok and I found out:
|
| - no contact injuries are troubling b/c it generally means they
| pulled something
|
| - kids don't generally tear an ACL (or other ligament)
|
| - it's actually way more common for the ligament to pull the
| anchor point off of the bigger bone b/c kid bones are soft
|
| I asked it to differentially diagnose the issue with the details
| of: can't hold weight, little to no swelling and some pain.
|
| It was adamant, ADAMANT, that this was a classic case of bone
| being pulled off by the ligament and that it would require
| surgery. It even pointed out the no swelling could be due to a
| very small tear etc. It gave me a 90% chance of surgery too.
|
| I followed up by asking what test would definitely prove it one
| way or the other and it mentioned getting an X-Ray.
|
| We go off to the urgent care, son is already kind of hobbling
| around. Doctor says he seems fine, I push for an X-Ray and turns
| out no issue: he probably just pulled something. He was fully
| healed in 2-3 days.
|
| As someone who has done a lot of differential
| diagnosing/troubleshooting of big systems (FinTech SRE) I find it
| interesting that it was basically correct in what could have
| happened but couldn't go the "final mile" to establish it
| correctly. Once we start hooking up X-Rays to Claude/Grok 4.2 etc
| equivalent LLMs, will be even more interesting to see where this
| goes.
| WarmWash wrote:
| >I did some searching with Grok
|
| Grok is...not most people's first choice.
|
| At least both OpenAI and Deep Mind do medical fine tuning, and
| both are almost certainly paying doctors to do it.
| jrflowers wrote:
| I like this post about a chat bot being 100% completely,
| confidently, adamantly wrong that characterizes it as being
| "basically right" about something that was untrue and did not
| happen.
|
| It is like getting phished and then pointing out that the
| scammer was basically right about being Coinbase support aside
| from the fact that they did not work there
| scuff3d wrote:
| I feel like we're in the part of the dystopian SciFi movie where
| they explain how civilization discovered some technological
| advance that they thought would be a panacea to all their woes.
| And despite not really understanding it or it's limitations, just
| started slapping it on absolutely everything, and before they
| know what happened everything comes crashing down.
| q3k wrote:
| We are witnessing the Great Filter in action.
|
| (and not just with the AI stuff)
| tgtweak wrote:
| Much like talking to your doctor - you need to ask/prompt the
| right questions. I've seen chatgpt and gemini make one false
| assumption that was never mentioned and run with it and continue
| referencing it down the line as if it were fact... That can be
| extremely dangerous if you don't know enough to ask it to reframe
| or verify, or correct it's assumption.
|
| If you are using it like a tool to review/analyze or simplify
| something - ie explain risk stratification for a particular
| cancer variant and what is taken into account, or ask it to
| provide probabilities and ranges for survival based on
| age/medical history, it's usually on the money.
|
| Every other caveat mentioned here is valid, and it's valid for
| many domains not just medical.
|
| I did get hemotologist/oncologist level advice out of chatgpt 4o
| based on labs, pcr tests and symptoms - and those turned out to
| be 100% true based on how things panned out in the months that
| followed and ultimately the treatment that was given. Doctors do
| not like to tell you the good and the bad candidly - it's always
| "we'll see what the next test says but things look positive" and
| "it could be as soon as 1 week or as long as several months
| depending on what we find" when they know full well you're in
| there for 2 months at minimum you're a miracle case. Only once
| cornered or prompted will they give you a larger view of the big
| picture. The same is true for most professional fields.
| Kuyawa wrote:
| "Doctors are more like machines"
|
| "Machines are more like humans"
|
| I love the future...
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