7 ms·

ChatGPT Saved My Life (no, seriously, I'm writing this from the ER)

140 points by bethanymarz 2y ago

vekatimest 2y ago
[flagged]
p_ing 2y ago
A search for 'low platelet count with small red bumps on skin' also will point you to getting care urgently. No AI needed.
- throwawayffffas 2y ago
  While I agree in principle. She didn't know she had low platelet count. The AI spotted it after it asked for blood works. This should become standard. When blood works or whatever exam results are available they should go through some kind of automated system that can flag critical situations like this, without waiting for a doctor.
  - p_ing 2y ago
    When I go for labs, I always am notified via txt/email that the results are ready. Every lab I've used has a scale system for a given test along with notes from the lab techs about a particular result. While this might not be standard everywhere in the world, and probably isn't, if one was concerned about their health and had access to their results themselves, wouldn't you look at them? This reminds me of the redditors who post questions about mundane government services where it would be quicker to simply call the agency in question and ask.
    - giancarlostoro 2y ago
      > it would be quicker to simply call the agency in question and ask. Depends on the service / agency. Some have long wait times. Heck ChatGPT might be quicker than both reddit and the agency at this point, and I'm not an "AI bro" by any means... But I gotta accept when its usefulness actually works.
    - HelloMcFly 2y ago
      > This reminds me of the redditors who post questions about mundane government services where it would be quicker to simply call the agency in question and ask. Wow oh wow does this depend on the agency, and depend on the question, and assumes you even know how to ask the question the right way. And I think considering that, the analogy operates quite well. People often don't know how to ask about medical things, they just describe symptoms ("platelet count" probably isn't a highly googled term for self-diagnosis). People do similar things when they have a problem with government and don't know where to turn, may not know which agency to contact, or how navigate that agency's phone trees, etc.
      - p_ing 2y ago
        I constantly see in a couple of locale-specific subreddits that say "Does <agency_name> do this? how long will it take?". And funny enough, most of the responses are "Did you call <agency_name>?". Usually it's the DOL which around here is quick to get a hold of via phone.
    - jackstraw14 2y ago
      I know what you're talking about, and the last lab results I got contained more data than I've ever seen before on one of those things. There were one or two results outside of the normal range, which my doctor addressed with me directly, and now everything is mostly normal. Are you saying that the doctor failed to take action on something that was at a concerning level on her labs? Or that she should have scanned her labs for anything that was on the edges of those normal ranges? I generally agree that more data is a good thing, but simple blood work can be kind of a large amount of data now that's not immediately recognizable to the average person. However, this is exactly the case where I want more assistance with AI... there's simply too much data for me to reliably tell what's meaningful and what's not anymore. AI can process a bunch of data and tell me what I need to know in about a second or two.
      - nytesky 2y ago
        I have stopped looking at my lab results because all it does most the time is caused me extreme anxiety. I have a rare disease which causes an obscure blood marker to basically jump two orders of magnitude. If you google this jump marker, basically all the links you find are about a deadly leukemia that you will be dead of in six months. My appointment with my doctor was two weeks away. Those were very very dark two weeks. I definitely think you should go over the results with your doctor, but Google or even ChatGPT is not a doctor
        jackstraw14 2y ago
        Wow, I'm glad you figured it out and I bet those two weeks were hell. With anything health related, I think information found online and information from AI tools should just be considered helpers toward determining something more specific that you can address. I certainly would not vouch for all AI assistance, and you shouldn't just give more weight to an AI system more than an article from a supposed expert necessarily. But, if you know you are working with good tools (like Claude Sonnet, which I would recommend for this particular case we're talking about) they shouldn't steer you too far in the wrong direction. Claude specifically has been the gentlest, most helpful general assistant I've ever had, but I don't ever lose sight of the fact that these are simply tools helping me, a non-perfect human with a lot still to learn, and I wouldn't recommend using them as any kind of "authoritative" solution, just something that's about the best help I've had with this kind of stuff so far. The final decision should be between you and your doctor.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    I'm 99.9% certain that every single blood work results out there provide your measurements in relation to what's considered low/normal/high
    - thomasfedb 2y ago
      Generally yes. Sometimes what’s “normal” is highly dependant on other factors. In that case you might get a table or other comparative information provided. That said, some results are still concerning if they’re “high-normal” or “low-normal”, and some results are not that worrying even if they’re slightly abnormal.
  - thomasfedb 2y ago
    These systems likely vary around the world, this is an Australian perspective. > When blood works or whatever exam results are available they should go through some kind of automated system that can flag critical situations like this, without waiting for a doctor. We already have this. Based on either individual results or how results relate to each other. Labs will detect critical results and then a range of things happen: - a scientist may repeat or check the result if the value is extreme, to ensure it isn’t an error - a scientist may alert a pathologist to the result immediately - a scientist or pathologist may contact the referring doctor/hospital by phone to provide the result immediately - in some cases, the lab will contact the patient directly (if they need to go directly to hospital for example) This also gets done with radiology. This then gets followed by the official report in hours to days depending on how much confirmation is required.
- figassis 2y ago
  People will not know to ask about platelet count. She had to tell the AI what she was seeing, and then upload a picture to get a more precise diagnosis and recommendation. You can't upload a photo to google and get a similar result. You will get lots if similar photos maybe. And even if you could, the UX would be terrible. Combine that with having AI on your phone and being able to just take a picture, or talking live to it. Anyway, this comment reads wildly similar to the dropbox comment.
  - giancarlostoro 2y ago
    > Anyway, this comment reads wildly similar to the dropbox comment. Dropbox?
    - 147 2y ago
      This infamous one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - impure-aqua 2y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
    - Rychard 2y ago
      The comment is referencing the "Dropbox" comment of lore https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Basically, something along the lines of (paraphrasing) 'this can be done today by using existing tooling'
  - spudlyo 2y ago
    > And even if you could, the UX would be terrible. - Accept cookies? - Turn off your ad blocker please! - Why not sign up for our newsletter? - Here's an interstitial ad - Like us on social media! ...oh by the way, you should probably go to the ER.
mrcwinn 2y ago
I'm really glad you're okay!
- bethanymarz 2y ago
  thank you!
keithwhor 2y ago
This is incredible. IMO, saving one life justifies every cent invested into OpenAI. How many thousands (or many, many more) will we never know about? This is a huge differentiator from Google, where doctors sigh and act aggressively skeptical when you do your own research.
- lm28469 2y ago
  I wouldn't be so quick at disregarding negative outcomes, side effects, &c.
- homebrewer 2y ago
  How many lives are destroyed in the process by building more coal power stations? How many will be in the future by accelerating global warming?
  - MangoCoffee 2y ago
    >building more coal power stations That doesn't seem to be the case. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIjJtyRjiOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIjJtyRjiOI
    - jp191919 2y ago
      China is building the most new coal power, by a large margin. They love coal.
- aredox 2y ago
  You want to save more than one life? Tax the rich.
- realslimjd 2y ago
  I think doctors who are skeptical of a patient's Google research would also be skeptical about a patient's ChatGPT research.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > IMO, saving one life justifies every cent invested into OpenAI. How many thousands (or many, many more) will we never know about? What if every cent spent on OpenAI, spent elsewhere, had saved two lives?
dangoodmanUT 2y ago
the website keeps crashing, i wish I could read it
- hypercube33 2y ago
  Same. It loads for me then gives an error saying it cant load.
- FeepingCreature 2y ago
  Snagged a pastebin https://pastebin.com/awpVkJB7 https://pastebin.com/awpVkJB7
- cj 2y ago
  TLDR: She was having some health issues, so asked ChatGPT. It recommended she get bloodwork done, but she already had and got the results the night before but her doctor hadn't reviewed the results yet. So she uploaded the lab results to ChatGPT, which responded with "Your platelet count is alarmingly low. You should go to the ER urgently."
- bethanymarz 2y ago
  Try again now: https://hardmodefirst.xyz/chatgpt-saved-my-life-no,-seriously,-im-writing-this-from-the-er https://hardmodefirst.xyz/chatgpt-saved-my-life-no,-seriousl...
piyuv 2y ago
This is more of a failure of the healthcare system rather than a win/success of LLMs.
- grungydan 2y ago
  Most astute comment so far.
- FeepingCreature 2y ago
  Hey, marginal life saved is marginal life saved.
- anarticle 2y ago
  Which will be fixed/improve first under the conditions we have right now?
- tim333 2y ago
  You say "failure of the healthcare system" but I imagine doctors being too busy to check the test results quickly happens in most healthcare systems.
  - 113 2y ago
    That doesn't stop it being a failure of the healthcare system.
- sebazzz 2y ago
  Yes, it is beautiful that someone can potentially self-diagnose with ChatGPT* - but if you're worried about your health, you really shouldn't need to use it and just be free to go to the GP or GPC (outside opening hours) without worrying if you are going to have a debt for the foreseeing time. * with at the same time having this data nicely collected for OpenAI to boost further training
- xtracto 2y ago
  The "I took a Taxi to the ER" amazed me. I would have called an ambulance right away. Not in the US though.
FeepingCreature 2y ago
Web site design survey! "When my site is under load, I should:" - Fall back to a degraded text mode representation that is still readable - Redirect to an error display - Load the site correctly, then a few seconds later redirect to the error display anyways, forcing users to quickly ctrl-A ctrl-C so they can read the article Hint to the designer: it's not the third one. edit: Snagged a pastebin https://pastebin.com/awpVkJB7 https://pastebin.com/awpVkJB7
- dangoodmanUT 2y ago
  [flagged]
- skizm 2y ago
  I usually quickly ctrl+p to save a pdf haha.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
grungydan 2y ago
“Really?” One finally said, with emphasis. Then, a nod. “That’s actually pretty amazing. Good on you. That’s exactly what we want AI to do—help people catch things early.” Today on "that totally happened."
grungydan 2y ago
“Really?” One finally said, with emphasis. Then, a nod. “That’s actually pretty amazing. Good on you. That’s exactly what we want AI to do—help people catch things early.” Today, on "that totally happened."
- bethanymarz 2y ago
  you'll just have to trust me on this one.
pickledish 2y ago
Thank you for writing this and sharing it here! I know there are a lot of conversations going on about the dangerous elements of LLMs, but it’s nice to read a story like this alongside them — it’s a reminder of the remarkable potential of this new technology. Could you have found out somehow else about the severity of the problem? Maybe, sure! But the fact that you had this LLM to ask, and it so easily understood whatever info you gave it, asked clarifying follow-up questions, and gave you info/directions in the way you needed to hear them — it’s such a new way of interacting with computers, almost like an API but made for humans to use, and cases like this is where that value shines most clearly IMO.
- bethanymarz 2y ago
  Thank you for sharing this feedback! Yes, the big unlock for me was using the LLM to explain things to me on my own terms and that's what ultimately gave it more persuasive power over even a simple (non-personalized) google search
doctoboggan 2y ago
My wife is a doctor and she already has an AI scribe that records visits, transcribes them, summarizes, and prepares her orders. It seems like having that scribe also review lab results wouldn’t be far off, but we are still not ready to let the AI system interpret and inform the patient without human intervention. The problem here wasn’t that a human missed the low platelet count, it’s just that it wasn’t reviewed yet. Both a doctor and an AI system would haven spotted the issue immediately. I am not saying this isn’t a great result, but the AI intervention must come from the patient side, not the care providers side. The providers have too much at risk, while the patient is able to pick and choose their own AI and decide what levels of risk they are able to accept.
- atonse 2y ago
  I said in another thread that I think that the first step can at least be that an LLM helps triage/prioritize the test results so docs can at least know an order in which to review them, especially with radiology/imaging results which are mostly words-based, rather than the numerical results that often come out of blood tests.
- jstanley 2y ago
  I can't tell if you're trying to say that ChatGPT hasn't added anything here? Yes I'm sure a human doctor would have noticed the low platelet count -- if they bothered to look at it. Which they didn't (or at least hadn't got around to yet).
  - doctoboggan 2y ago
    Sorry, I edited my comment with a final statement. I think chatGPT added a lot and I think the future of AI in medicine is with patients bringing their own AI to help interpret the results.
- xnorswap 2y ago
  It doesn't need "AI" or a "Scribe" to spot a low platelet count in lab results either, computer systems have been able to do this for decades. There's a systemic failure that a computer wasn't already flagging up the low count for immediate follow-up. What I find interesting is that AI (or more specifically LLMs / chat-GPT ) has had such an impact it's broken down barriers from people who previously would be against any computer involvement or automation. People have gone from, "You must not automate anything" to "We should feed everything into chat GPT".. And from someone who has in the past been interested in statistical modelling, it's dizzying. It's as if statistics were seen as boring and fallible, but "AI" is exciting and wonderful.
throwaway153371 2y ago
Unpopular take: ChatGPT is better at diagnosing medical problems than a doctor who does a cursory evaluation. By cursory, I mean an evaluation that does not take into account a very thorough assessment of all the evidence. P(condition | evidence) is not very accurate when the evidence is vague and sounds like many other conditions. It is a rare doctor who spends more than a few minutes asking about all possible symptoms, even those that may not occur to the patient that they have. Such doctors certainly exist, and I’ve had a few, but for the most part I have to do my own research and present it to a doctor for it to even be considered as a possibility. As anecdata of one, I’ve been having all sorts of weird rashes that come and go. Could be eczema, lupus, psoriasis, who knows. Googling makes you think it could be anything. So I took my entire medical history, all medications, all symptoms, their frequency, etc. and threw everything into ChatGPT with the prompt “Give me a list of possible diagnoses ranked by likelihood based on the evidence”. At the top of the list “Mononucleosis (EBV induced)”. Ah, but I forgot to mention that I had mono 12 years ago. I can’t catch that twice. So I told ChatGPT that I had it previously. “Still mono. Possibly recurrent due to some problem of the immune system.” So I went and got an EBV antibody panel. Positive for all three, including the EBNA test which is positive if you ever had mono previously. It blew my mind that a LLM sussed this out, because mono wasn’t even on my radar.
- dartos 2y ago
  It’s not just unpopular, it’s dangerous. Please people, for the love of life and health, don’t trust your medical issues to LLMs. You’re lucky it was just mono. Maybe find a better doctor if you feel you’re not getting good enough care…
  - atonse 2y ago
    I agree with this. Any coder can tell you that AI will write some decent code, but it takes (at least at this point in time) an experienced coder to tell "this is crap code" or "this is decent code" – find a better doctor, because it's going to be hard to tell whether the advice it's giving you is the equivalent of crap code or good quality code.
  - throwaway153371 2y ago
nyreed 2y ago
Don't see what an LLM really adds here that wouldn't be served by a sensible algorithm which flags up results needing urgent action. Maybe the end user get more clearly explained and non-bewildering information, which is useful, but also points to a failure of any health system / internet resources to provide this. The LLM _HAS_ empowered the patient to act on his own health, which is undeniably a good thing. Not sure about seeing the LLM as a companion.
- FeepingCreature 2y ago
  It seems to me what the LLM adds is that it is the sensible algorithm which flags up results needing urgent action in a growing set of everyday domains.
- djmips 2y ago
  The human like conversation urging to go to the ER was particularly useful in this instance. I am not saying I don't fear for it's mistakes but clearly it's ability to communciate in natural language is something to not take for granted.
- Out_of_Characte 2y ago
  To be fair, This is what AI is good at. No matter what problem you're trying to solve, AI will provide a solution. In this case, lab result analysis was entirely based around standard care protocols that LLM is really good at regurgitating back to you. Yeah sure, anyone could probaly promt feed this into a homeopathy solution which would have killed the patient as per their own predisposed will. You could argue a standard programmatic diagnostic evaluation would be better but its not entirely clear wether human decision making improves based on webMD above an agitated Chatgpt urging you to seek professional help. And now that I think about it more, no one except doctors and AI could reliably improve diagnosis based on a picture and lab results side by side. So if your healthcare system doesn't provide a response then chatgpt might actually be the closest neighbour in time of need.
- tim333 2y ago
  It has the benefit of existing and saving the author as opposed to some hypothetical algorithm that doesn't.
aantix 2y ago
It’s possible to now get plausible diagnoses through an LLM. For which you can further discuss with your doctor. 1. Get your DNA fully sequenced for $200 from Nebula. 2. Download your .cram file. 50gb+ 2a. Or if you have a 23andme profile, just request to download your raw data. Use that output file. 3. Use WGS Extract to generate a datafile from the cram file of the SNPs and genotypes. 4. Zip that output file. Upload to a ChatGPT session. 5. This enables you to ask questions about your specific genetic profile. Bring your findings to your doctor. Discuss their plausibility. It may surface a solution that they hadn’t thought of.
- FeepingCreature 2y ago
  > WGS Extract Good god that install script. This is it, this is the tool that AppImage was created for.
  - aantix 2y ago
    Pull requests welcomed.
    - FeepingCreature 2y ago
      Might throw it into an AI later.
    - FeepingCreature 2y ago
      Okay I tried to get Sonnet to do it for like two hours and I give up, sorry.
- lm28469 2y ago
  You might as well piss on the floor, take a picture of the puddle, upload it to chatgpt and ask it if you'll develop cancer between 2033 and 2037, you'd probably get the same amount of hallucination.
  - aantix 2y ago
    No. Maybe if you abandon all logic. With an LLM, we’re trying to efficiently search the entire space using as many granular, personal attributes as possible. We’re trying to find plausible hypotheses. Especially those that haven’t been considered. The final determination and action is still a partnership between you and your doctor.
quantumwoke 2y ago
I read this post with my wife (medical doctor) and we agreed that this breathless post missed the mark a bit. ChatGPT gave exactly the advice from a Google search for low platelets and rash. A call to any doctor, nurse practitioner or urgent care would have resulted in the same outcome with arguably more trust. The fact that the author trusted ChatGPT more for some reason (AI hype?) seems immaterial. The hyperbole of statements like a minor cut with low platelets = death or having "no platelets" (both false) solidified it - hype over substance.
- Toutouxc 2y ago
  She didn’t trust ChatGPT more, ChatGPT was just available when the doctor was not.
  - quantumwoke 2y ago
    But there is an ER, urgent care, etc. available at most if not all times? Google is also available and would have accomplished the same result.
    - FeepingCreature 2y ago
      Google for "low platelet" sure, if you already know that's important which she did not. The hard part here was entirely noticing that there was an urgent problem.
      - quantumwoke 2y ago
        As multiple people in this thread have commented, most providers give you a result, a red highlight of the abnormal result, and a reference range. We don't know exactly what the post author received of course, but it's pretty likely that low platelets were called out.
        FeepingCreature 2y ago
        The critical missing info is "your platelets are low, keep an eye open for red spots on your skin that spread."
atonse 2y ago
A friend of mine had gotten an imaging test done recently, and had to wait 7 days to have her doctor review it. Meanwhile, she got the report and was paralyzed with worry by some of the words (like high risk for ____, etc). I feel like this is an area where AI/LLMs/whatever can actually help triage test results to tell doctors "hey you really should look at this test result first, it looks concerning" - this would happen in a way that you can't do with other bloodwork (which returns numbers on a scale). Most radiology reports are just written words, so LLMs could potentially use that to triage and help alert the care provider to prioritize it, so patients aren't sitting there worried for days on end until a doc analyzes it.
- quantumwoke 2y ago
  Question to which I don't have the answer: does an instant LLM response that says you may have cancer, infection or some other malady based on a report alleviate your suspicions? Or would you rather wait for a measured discussion with a professional? Personally speaking, I might be fooled into contacting my doctor inappropriately citing a false positive from DrGPT which seems inefficient.
- unixfg 2y ago
  My previous PCP used a system that would tell me my results are in, but I wasn’t allowed to view them until the doctor called me to talk about it.
  - atonse 2y ago
    Right and in this case the doc hadn’t called in many days which I feel was negligent on their part, leaving the patient to self analyze.
- thomasfedb 2y ago
  Arguably the issue in your friend’s case is providing the patient with a document that’s not designed for them. Radiology reports are written with a particular audience in mind. They are also written with a particular medicolegal perspective, which the intended audience will appreciate. I often give my patients copies of their results/reports, which gives me an opportunity to explain them. If we are going to send reports to patients directly, maybe they need to be written differently? Who should pay for that different report to be written/checked? We already have AI tools for prioritising the order some tests are processed in (e.g. which X-Rays the radiologist looks at first). But once the report is written the author has a responsibility to ensure any urgent result is escalated. As a requester (I order tests), if I result needs urgent action within days or less, I expect a phone call to myself or another doctor in the practice.
sixQuarks 2y ago
How terrible is our healthcare system? There should be automatic alerts when a blood test returns dangerous levels like this
- bethanymarz 2y ago
  i agree!
aredox 2y ago
One could have done exactly the same thing with expert systems we had in the 60s. Or a checklist. Or a reference book. Far more reliable, no risk of hallucination.
- lblume 2y ago
  > Far more reliable, no risk of hallucination. Only as reliable as the information contained in the system. The whole point of an LLM is to agglomerate as much information as possible with little manual intervention which causes them to both be a) far more intelligent and knowledgeable than any old-school symbolic expert system, and b) also more prone to biases and hallucinations.
  - aredox 2y ago
    Red spots on the skin -> coagulation problems is fairly basic medical knowledge. Even a cursory Google search would be enough to get that answer.
- jodrellblank 2y ago
  I don't have an expert medical system from the 1960s and an IBM 360 to run it on. Or a checklist [that I know is relevant]. Or a reference book [that I know is relevant, and know where to look in it, and what to look for]. What then?
maxymoos 2y ago
Oof, you don't go down to zero platelets without something gone seriously off the rails. Seems like it got caught right in time, but wishing for the best in the follow-up. This being said, a problem with blood tests is that a layperson won't know right off the bat if a value outside of the normal range is ok or a life-threatening issue. I understand it might introduce a lot of complexity for labs and that there's some level of "big picture analysis" involved that will require some human intervention, but even just a color-coded line for WBC/RBC, hemoglobin and platelets could already go a long way, as OP's case demonstrates.
- quantumwoke 2y ago
  These have existed for decades, although it might not always be surfaced. My provider gives me the reference range with every blood test and a red line for abnormal so I can know immediately where to start looking.
rom1v 2y ago
As a non-native Ensligh speaker, I asked ChatGPT what the ER acronym means: Emergency Room (I guessed E was for "Emergency" after reading your story, but I didn't know about the 'R'). AI is also helpful to parse the story about how AI is helpful.
Diti 2y ago
What the author should have done, as soon as they saw the physician had not yet looked at the results, is to immediately go to a pharmacy and show them the results. I’m glad AI has been useful this time, but pharmacists are experts too (and would tell you if they are not sure of something, instead of confabulating).
- boole1854 2y ago
  According to the story, the ChatGPT conversation that led to the ER visit happened on a Sunday. In my part of the world, all local pharmacies are closed on Sundays, so going to a pharmacy and showing the results would not have been an option.
- Toutouxc 2y ago
  That’s interesting, that wouldn’t occur to me at all. Is that a thing where you live? Going to the pharmacy to get diagnosed? (with something more complicated than a runny nose)
- nick3443 2y ago
  Really? In the USA? Wouldn't they say "sorry I'm not your doctor, do you have a prescription for something that needs dispensing?"
itkovian_ 2y ago
Story is good example of a why there's no "killer app" for llms. They are the killer app. There's no stack to this tech. People don't want to admit this because of the massive concentration of power that becomes clear after you accept this.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  It's not an either / or though, this is a generalized LLM (app being a chatbot), there's also specialized LLMs for things like writing code, prose, etc.
- maxwell 2y ago
  What's defensible? LLMs seem like gunpowder artillery to last decade's moats.
- tim333 2y ago
  The concentration of power isn't that bad as there are about half a dozen rival llms including open source.
  - itkovian_ 2y ago
    All competitive open models today share a common property; someone spent a large amount of money to train them and then released the model for free. I don't understand why the argument continues to be we will have a rich ecosystem of base open source models; unlike opensource ai which is individuals donating time, opensource ai requires someone to donate very large amounts of capital.
  - npteljes 2y ago
    They are open source in the way Android is open source. The actual results are open source indeed, but the culture and the chain isn't, so, if the people who run the projects decide that they are not open anymore, they won't be. And so, the projects will stop, as there will be nobody to release the newer versions. Same as how Android could maybe maintained indefinitely, but not improved in a way that it is right now.
vaporwario 2y ago
Wasn't this revealed as a fraud/joke like 2 months ago? [Edit: Callout: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1glttmh/i_asked_chatgpt_to_write_like_a_reddit_post_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1glttmh/i_asked_ch... Original Post: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1glqv2o/chatgpt_saved_my_life_and_im_still_freaking_out/lvynygp/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1glqv2o/chatgpt_sa... ]
- djmips 2y ago
  source?
  - vaporwario 2y ago
    So I couldn't find the specific post I was thinking of off hand, and there seems to be about a dozen or so hits on various forum-type sites like Quora/Reddit etc. So... yeah I don't know, maybe it is real? But there has been an instance of someone using an LLM to make a story about an LLM saving their life. So maybe this one is real. Maybe it is not? Who knows. Reality is kind of mushy these days.
    - vaporwario 2y ago
      Additional notes here, the author of the article in this topic clearly indicates on her page that she writes alongside "Taylor Script", her AI counterpart. So now the line is even more explicitly blurred. An AI definitively was involved in the creation of this content... so now the question is, to what degree does the content relate back to real world events? Only the author knows I guess.
      - FeepingCreature 2y ago
        This of course goes for pretty much every personal story ever posted here.
      - bethanymarz 2y ago
        see the addendum at the bottom of the blog: https://hardmodefirst.xyz/chatgpt-saved-my-life-no,-seriously,-im-writing-this-from-the-er https://hardmodefirst.xyz/chatgpt-saved-my-life-no,-seriousl...
keiferski 2y ago
I've been re-watching House lately and I can't help but constantly think that a LLM would be excellent at diagnostics. At least in the sense of, "the patient has displayed XYZ symptoms, the test results have XYZ data, and ergo the following conditions are likely. Especially in the more obscure interactions and second-order effects.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Medical experts have done teardowns of House episodes and most of what happens in the series wouldn't happen in real life, that is, diagnoses are better than how they are depicted there.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    Oh yeah I'm sure it's not super accurate, I just mean the specific task of diagnosing a patient would seem to benefit from a LLM-like piece of software.
    - gsck 2y ago
      But surely this could just be done with a constraint software, with better accuracy and less likelihood of making something up?
      - keiferski 2y ago
        Possibly but in my experience LLMs are more useful for brainstorming and generating original ideas than “being accurate” all of the time. Hence my idea that they could be useful in diagnosing difficult conditions.
      - wholinator2 2y ago
        Yeah, it's a trade off between certainty and creativity. Constraint software would be all certainty which, if it contained all the required information, would be the perfect system. But we don't have "all the information", or at least i haven't seen anyone claim so. So some degree of out-of-box creativity is required to catch more obscure correlations and strangeness. I think AI is just about as certain as previous systems, but with a big boost to the creativity aspect. It's also free. I can imagine the omnidiagnoser would be a closely held trade secret worth billions and thus absolutely not free to the public.
1970-01-01 2y ago
Yes it did. Let's not only praise ChatGPT because it said the right thing at the right time. ChatGPT told you how to stay alive, and the ER team did the work to keep you alive. Both systems were critical in the save.
- bethanymarz 2y ago
  Agree. Both of these were critically important components.
vaporwario 2y ago
Wasn't this revealed as a fraud/fake post from Reddit like 2 months ago?
- djmips 2y ago
  Link?
  - bethanymarz 2y ago
    Not a fraud. Hi. It me. Still in the hospital right now
    - djmips 2y ago
      Hey there. Hope you get something figured out! I'm rooting for you.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
arafatamim 2y ago
Last time I uploaded a medical report it outright refused to provide any analysis
sarchertech 2y ago
What happens when someone asks ChatGPT does medical advice and it misses something fatal? My guess is that the end result is that companies are going to tune their models to default to telling people to go to the ER.
- DangitBobby 2y ago
  Unless they are advertised as medical practitioners, I don't see how they could possibly be liable for bad medical advice. You can't sue your friend or dad for bad medical advice. Maybe you can if they claim themselves to be a licensed medical practitioner you'd have a shot at a successful lawsuit.
  - sarchertech 2y ago
    You don’t have to claim you are a licensed medical professional to be sued for medical advice that harms someone. You just need to present your advice in a way that a reasonable person would assume that you have some kind of medical expertise. Based on the confident manner with which all LLMs present their answers and based on the fact that people are clearly using LLMs for their medical expertise, I think it would be pretty easy to go after one for giving medical advice that caused actual damages.
rafram 2y ago
> Next, ChatGPT suggested I ask a physician for some bloodwork. That’s when I remembered—I’d already received my lab results (unceremoniously, via email) late last night. One result was abnormal, I mentioned to ChatGPT. This is the point at which you call your doctor.
- GTP 2y ago
  She tried, but the point was that the doctor wasn't available at that moment.
  - bethanymarz 2y ago
    yup. about 2 hours had passed from when i left a note to my doctor (on a sunday) and ultimately decided to go into the ER
Clubber 2y ago
AI is extremely good at finding patterns quickly. Even without AGI, this will be extremely useful. I kinda feel like AGI and replacing developers is a distraction to the power AI/ML already has available.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
iLoveOncall 2y ago
I'm sure the opposite story also already exists, with people overdosing on medicine on the advice of ChatGPT.
tinyhouse 2y ago
This is likely to get downvoted, but in my experience with the health care system in America, I'd prefer consulting ChatGPT over ~50% of the doctors. Too many doctors who I have no idea how they graduated from med school, and even worse, advocate for solutions that maximize profits. If I can provide one advice is to always question your doctors. Get multiple opinions on serious issues, and educate yourself like this person did. Come prepared to doctor visits and don't be afraid to challenge them if they tell you something that contradicts what you learned.
dathinab 2y ago
the really sad part here is that even without any fancy AI a lot of unusual blood results can be reliably detected and flagged as urgent or emergency i.e. he shouldn't had to have to consult ChatGPT in this case through then given how good people can be to convince themself that they shouldn't call help even if they really need it (or the opposite) ChatGPT might really help there
justlikereddit 2y ago
This one could be twenty years old "Dr Google saved my life" It's a very rudimentary chain of medical reasoning and doesn't really need an LLM to conclude that low platelets and petechiae is bad news
- bethanymarz 2y ago
  the difference was that i didn't know to put two and two together on my own at the time i was anchoring on digestive issues and hadn't thought too much about the bloodwork results
voidUpdate 2y ago
> New bruises without injury = your blood is not clotting properly I can't see any mention at all of bruises being a symptom in the article, did I miss that bit? Also if you're going to fill an article with ai-generated images, can't you at least photoshop in some correct text instead of getting an AI to try and writing the text for you? "Honestly? chatgpt convunced me." isn't awful, but "Ancôoidions, your instructions." is completely incomprehensible to me
- wartijn_ 2y ago
  If I search on that page for “Ancôoidions” or “convunced” I don’t get any results.
  - voidUpdate 2y ago
    The 6th image on the page, of a woman lying in a hospital bed, has a speech bubble with garbled ai-generated text inside of it, and the next image has a classic-style walking robot, half submerged into a rug, saying similarly garbled text
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
sepositus 2y ago
> Needless to say, something is deeply broken in our healthcare system. As someone currently experiencing multiple unexplained systems and getting shuffled around to experts who continue to push appointments further and further back, I can't agree more. I've been using AI a lot lately, and some of these specialists I have actually met with are often surprised at how much knowledge I came in with (granted, I've always been this way, even before AI, it's just now even easier). But yeah, I had a similar but much less extreme case where I had tests come back, and my primary didn't even look at it for four days. Luckily, I was able to supplement and resolve the (minor) issue myself after talking it over with AI.
pwr22 2y ago
Lots of gushing about AI but I'm not really too interested in that.... more about what's up with your missing platelets! I'm assuming it's not at all a good thing to suddenly not have any without any prior history of things related to this? Hope everything works out okay in the end :).
pknerd 2y ago
My Mom was in the ICU back in 2024 due to lung and heart issues. I wouldn't say I blindly followed what GPT suggested but it definitely helped to understand lap reports, ECG, and other imageries to understand doctors' lingo
Mikhail_K 2y ago
The dual blogpost "ChatGPT cost me my life" wasn't written for the obvious reason
xigoi 2y ago
This is why we need AI to be open. Imagine if ChatGPT had forced her to watch a five-minute advertisement before each query – which is going to happen in the near future.
lr1970 2y ago
If this story narrative is true as described in the article this is a ground for reporting the primary care physician to the state board for a review. I am not saying it is a malpractice per se, but a clear fail of the doctor's practice. All modern EMR systems (most popular in US is Epic) _automatically_ flag all the results that are out of normal range. A physician assistant should be alerted to this fact and take appropriate actions. Sitting on ER grade emergency for two days and then telling a patient it will take another 3 days to review the results is unacceptable.
- jazoom 2y ago
  I disagree. Doctors can't be expected to be available 100% of the time. The only doctor to see this patient's result was the pathologist (or should have been before being sent off to the requesting doctor). It had not yet been handed over to the requesting doctor in a fail-proof manner. The pathology company I send my samples to contacts my clinic to ensure we received urgent results. This it's important because there's no guarantee the message ever arrived in the doctor's inbox. If you work in tech you should know this to be the case. The only way to ensure timeliness is for the pathology company to contact the patient directly if they can't verbally hand over to the requesting doctor.
fnord77 2y ago
chatGPT killed me (no seriously, I'm writing this from the morgue)

140 points by bethanymarz 2y ago

[flagged]

A search for 'low platelet count with small red bumps on skin' also will point you to getting care urgently. No AI needed.

throwawayffffas 2y ago
While I agree in principle. She didn't know she had low platelet count. The AI spotted it after it asked for blood works. This should become standard. When blood works or whatever exam results are available they should go through some kind of automated system that can flag critical situations like this, without waiting for a doctor.
- p_ing 2y ago
  When I go for labs, I always am notified via txt/email that the results are ready. Every lab I've used has a scale system for a given test along with notes from the lab techs about a particular result. While this might not be standard everywhere in the world, and probably isn't, if one was concerned about their health and had access to their results themselves, wouldn't you look at them? This reminds me of the redditors who post questions about mundane government services where it would be quicker to simply call the agency in question and ask.
  - giancarlostoro 2y ago
    > it would be quicker to simply call the agency in question and ask. Depends on the service / agency. Some have long wait times. Heck ChatGPT might be quicker than both reddit and the agency at this point, and I'm not an "AI bro" by any means... But I gotta accept when its usefulness actually works.
  - HelloMcFly 2y ago
    > This reminds me of the redditors who post questions about mundane government services where it would be quicker to simply call the agency in question and ask. Wow oh wow does this depend on the agency, and depend on the question, and assumes you even know how to ask the question the right way. And I think considering that, the analogy operates quite well. People often don't know how to ask about medical things, they just describe symptoms ("platelet count" probably isn't a highly googled term for self-diagnosis). People do similar things when they have a problem with government and don't know where to turn, may not know which agency to contact, or how navigate that agency's phone trees, etc.
    - p_ing 2y ago
      I constantly see in a couple of locale-specific subreddits that say "Does <agency_name> do this? how long will it take?". And funny enough, most of the responses are "Did you call <agency_name>?". Usually it's the DOL which around here is quick to get a hold of via phone.
  - jackstraw14 2y ago
    I know what you're talking about, and the last lab results I got contained more data than I've ever seen before on one of those things. There were one or two results outside of the normal range, which my doctor addressed with me directly, and now everything is mostly normal. Are you saying that the doctor failed to take action on something that was at a concerning level on her labs? Or that she should have scanned her labs for anything that was on the edges of those normal ranges? I generally agree that more data is a good thing, but simple blood work can be kind of a large amount of data now that's not immediately recognizable to the average person. However, this is exactly the case where I want more assistance with AI... there's simply too much data for me to reliably tell what's meaningful and what's not anymore. AI can process a bunch of data and tell me what I need to know in about a second or two.
    - nytesky 2y ago
      I have stopped looking at my lab results because all it does most the time is caused me extreme anxiety. I have a rare disease which causes an obscure blood marker to basically jump two orders of magnitude. If you google this jump marker, basically all the links you find are about a deadly leukemia that you will be dead of in six months. My appointment with my doctor was two weeks away. Those were very very dark two weeks. I definitely think you should go over the results with your doctor, but Google or even ChatGPT is not a doctor
      - jackstraw14 2y ago
        Wow, I'm glad you figured it out and I bet those two weeks were hell. With anything health related, I think information found online and information from AI tools should just be considered helpers toward determining something more specific that you can address. I certainly would not vouch for all AI assistance, and you shouldn't just give more weight to an AI system more than an article from a supposed expert necessarily. But, if you know you are working with good tools (like Claude Sonnet, which I would recommend for this particular case we're talking about) they shouldn't steer you too far in the wrong direction. Claude specifically has been the gentlest, most helpful general assistant I've ever had, but I don't ever lose sight of the fact that these are simply tools helping me, a non-perfect human with a lot still to learn, and I wouldn't recommend using them as any kind of "authoritative" solution, just something that's about the best help I've had with this kind of stuff so far. The final decision should be between you and your doctor.
- lm28469 2y ago
  I'm 99.9% certain that every single blood work results out there provide your measurements in relation to what's considered low/normal/high
  - thomasfedb 2y ago
    Generally yes. Sometimes what’s “normal” is highly dependant on other factors. In that case you might get a table or other comparative information provided. That said, some results are still concerning if they’re “high-normal” or “low-normal”, and some results are not that worrying even if they’re slightly abnormal.
- thomasfedb 2y ago
  These systems likely vary around the world, this is an Australian perspective. > When blood works or whatever exam results are available they should go through some kind of automated system that can flag critical situations like this, without waiting for a doctor. We already have this. Based on either individual results or how results relate to each other. Labs will detect critical results and then a range of things happen: - a scientist may repeat or check the result if the value is extreme, to ensure it isn’t an error - a scientist may alert a pathologist to the result immediately - a scientist or pathologist may contact the referring doctor/hospital by phone to provide the result immediately - in some cases, the lab will contact the patient directly (if they need to go directly to hospital for example) This also gets done with radiology. This then gets followed by the official report in hours to days depending on how much confirmation is required.
figassis 2y ago
People will not know to ask about platelet count. She had to tell the AI what she was seeing, and then upload a picture to get a more precise diagnosis and recommendation. You can't upload a photo to google and get a similar result. You will get lots if similar photos maybe. And even if you could, the UX would be terrible. Combine that with having AI on your phone and being able to just take a picture, or talking live to it. Anyway, this comment reads wildly similar to the dropbox comment.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  > Anyway, this comment reads wildly similar to the dropbox comment. Dropbox?
  - 147 2y ago
    This infamous one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - impure-aqua 2y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - Rychard 2y ago
    The comment is referencing the "Dropbox" comment of lore https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Basically, something along the lines of (paraphrasing) 'this can be done today by using existing tooling'
- spudlyo 2y ago
  > And even if you could, the UX would be terrible. - Accept cookies? - Turn off your ad blocker please! - Why not sign up for our newsletter? - Here's an interstitial ad - Like us on social media! ...oh by the way, you should probably go to the ER.

mrcwinn 2y ago

I'm really glad you're okay!

bethanymarz 2y ago
thank you!

keithwhor 2y ago

This is incredible. IMO, saving one life justifies every cent invested into OpenAI. How many thousands (or many, many more) will we never know about? This is a huge differentiator from Google, where doctors sigh and act aggressively skeptical when you do your own research.

lm28469 2y ago
I wouldn't be so quick at disregarding negative outcomes, side effects, &c.
homebrewer 2y ago
How many lives are destroyed in the process by building more coal power stations? How many will be in the future by accelerating global warming?
- MangoCoffee 2y ago
  >building more coal power stations That doesn't seem to be the case. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIjJtyRjiOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIjJtyRjiOI
  - jp191919 2y ago
    China is building the most new coal power, by a large margin. They love coal.
aredox 2y ago
You want to save more than one life? Tax the rich.
realslimjd 2y ago
I think doctors who are skeptical of a patient's Google research would also be skeptical about a patient's ChatGPT research.
pavel_lishin 2y ago
> IMO, saving one life justifies every cent invested into OpenAI. How many thousands (or many, many more) will we never know about? What if every cent spent on OpenAI, spent elsewhere, had saved two lives?

dangoodmanUT 2y ago

the website keeps crashing, i wish I could read it

hypercube33 2y ago
Same. It loads for me then gives an error saying it cant load.
FeepingCreature 2y ago
Snagged a pastebin https://pastebin.com/awpVkJB7 https://pastebin.com/awpVkJB7
cj 2y ago
TLDR: She was having some health issues, so asked ChatGPT. It recommended she get bloodwork done, but she already had and got the results the night before but her doctor hadn't reviewed the results yet. So she uploaded the lab results to ChatGPT, which responded with "Your platelet count is alarmingly low. You should go to the ER urgently."
bethanymarz 2y ago
Try again now: https://hardmodefirst.xyz/chatgpt-saved-my-life-no,-seriously,-im-writing-this-from-the-er https://hardmodefirst.xyz/chatgpt-saved-my-life-no,-seriousl...

piyuv 2y ago

This is more of a failure of the healthcare system rather than a win/success of LLMs.

grungydan 2y ago
Most astute comment so far.
FeepingCreature 2y ago
Hey, marginal life saved is marginal life saved.
anarticle 2y ago
Which will be fixed/improve first under the conditions we have right now?
tim333 2y ago
You say "failure of the healthcare system" but I imagine doctors being too busy to check the test results quickly happens in most healthcare systems.
- 113 2y ago
  That doesn't stop it being a failure of the healthcare system.
sebazzz 2y ago
Yes, it is beautiful that someone can potentially self-diagnose with ChatGPT* - but if you're worried about your health, you really shouldn't need to use it and just be free to go to the GP or GPC (outside opening hours) without worrying if you are going to have a debt for the foreseeing time. * with at the same time having this data nicely collected for OpenAI to boost further training
xtracto 2y ago
The "I took a Taxi to the ER" amazed me. I would have called an ambulance right away. Not in the US though.

FeepingCreature 2y ago

Web site design survey! "When my site is under load, I should:" - Fall back to a degraded text mode representation that is still readable - Redirect to an error display - Load the site correctly, then a few seconds later redirect to the error display anyways, forcing users to quickly ctrl-A ctrl-C so they can read the article Hint to the designer: it's not the third one. edit: Snagged a pastebin https://pastebin.com/awpVkJB7 https://pastebin.com/awpVkJB7

dangoodmanUT 2y ago
[flagged]
skizm 2y ago
I usually quickly ctrl+p to save a pdf haha.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

grungydan 2y ago

“Really?” One finally said, with emphasis. Then, a nod. “That’s actually pretty amazing. Good on you. That’s exactly what we want AI to do—help people catch things early.” Today on "that totally happened."

grungydan 2y ago

“Really?” One finally said, with emphasis. Then, a nod. “That’s actually pretty amazing. Good on you. That’s exactly what we want AI to do—help people catch things early.” Today, on "that totally happened."

bethanymarz 2y ago
you'll just have to trust me on this one.

pickledish 2y ago

Thank you for writing this and sharing it here! I know there are a lot of conversations going on about the dangerous elements of LLMs, but it’s nice to read a story like this alongside them — it’s a reminder of the remarkable potential of this new technology. Could you have found out somehow else about the severity of the problem? Maybe, sure! But the fact that you had this LLM to ask, and it so easily understood whatever info you gave it, asked clarifying follow-up questions, and gave you info/directions in the way you needed to hear them — it’s such a new way of interacting with computers, almost like an API but made for humans to use, and cases like this is where that value shines most clearly IMO.

bethanymarz 2y ago
Thank you for sharing this feedback! Yes, the big unlock for me was using the LLM to explain things to me on my own terms and that's what ultimately gave it more persuasive power over even a simple (non-personalized) google search

doctoboggan 2y ago

My wife is a doctor and she already has an AI scribe that records visits, transcribes them, summarizes, and prepares her orders. It seems like having that scribe also review lab results wouldn’t be far off, but we are still not ready to let the AI system interpret and inform the patient without human intervention. The problem here wasn’t that a human missed the low platelet count, it’s just that it wasn’t reviewed yet. Both a doctor and an AI system would haven spotted the issue immediately. I am not saying this isn’t a great result, but the AI intervention must come from the patient side, not the care providers side. The providers have too much at risk, while the patient is able to pick and choose their own AI and decide what levels of risk they are able to accept.

atonse 2y ago
I said in another thread that I think that the first step can at least be that an LLM helps triage/prioritize the test results so docs can at least know an order in which to review them, especially with radiology/imaging results which are mostly words-based, rather than the numerical results that often come out of blood tests.
jstanley 2y ago
I can't tell if you're trying to say that ChatGPT hasn't added anything here? Yes I'm sure a human doctor would have noticed the low platelet count -- if they bothered to look at it. Which they didn't (or at least hadn't got around to yet).
- doctoboggan 2y ago
  Sorry, I edited my comment with a final statement. I think chatGPT added a lot and I think the future of AI in medicine is with patients bringing their own AI to help interpret the results.
xnorswap 2y ago
It doesn't need "AI" or a "Scribe" to spot a low platelet count in lab results either, computer systems have been able to do this for decades. There's a systemic failure that a computer wasn't already flagging up the low count for immediate follow-up. What I find interesting is that AI (or more specifically LLMs / chat-GPT ) has had such an impact it's broken down barriers from people who previously would be against any computer involvement or automation. People have gone from, "You must not automate anything" to "We should feed everything into chat GPT".. And from someone who has in the past been interested in statistical modelling, it's dizzying. It's as if statistics were seen as boring and fallible, but "AI" is exciting and wonderful.

throwaway153371 2y ago

Unpopular take: ChatGPT is better at diagnosing medical problems than a doctor who does a cursory evaluation. By cursory, I mean an evaluation that does not take into account a very thorough assessment of all the evidence. P(condition | evidence) is not very accurate when the evidence is vague and sounds like many other conditions. It is a rare doctor who spends more than a few minutes asking about all possible symptoms, even those that may not occur to the patient that they have. Such doctors certainly exist, and I’ve had a few, but for the most part I have to do my own research and present it to a doctor for it to even be considered as a possibility. As anecdata of one, I’ve been having all sorts of weird rashes that come and go. Could be eczema, lupus, psoriasis, who knows. Googling makes you think it could be anything. So I took my entire medical history, all medications, all symptoms, their frequency, etc. and threw everything into ChatGPT with the prompt “Give me a list of possible diagnoses ranked by likelihood based on the evidence”. At the top of the list “Mononucleosis (EBV induced)”. Ah, but I forgot to mention that I had mono 12 years ago. I can’t catch that twice. So I told ChatGPT that I had it previously. “Still mono. Possibly recurrent due to some problem of the immune system.” So I went and got an EBV antibody panel. Positive for all three, including the EBNA test which is positive if you ever had mono previously. It blew my mind that a LLM sussed this out, because mono wasn’t even on my radar.

dartos 2y ago
It’s not just unpopular, it’s dangerous. Please people, for the love of life and health, don’t trust your medical issues to LLMs. You’re lucky it was just mono. Maybe find a better doctor if you feel you’re not getting good enough care…
- atonse 2y ago
  I agree with this. Any coder can tell you that AI will write some decent code, but it takes (at least at this point in time) an experienced coder to tell "this is crap code" or "this is decent code" – find a better doctor, because it's going to be hard to tell whether the advice it's giving you is the equivalent of crap code or good quality code.
- throwaway153371 2y ago

nyreed 2y ago

Don't see what an LLM really adds here that wouldn't be served by a sensible algorithm which flags up results needing urgent action. Maybe the end user get more clearly explained and non-bewildering information, which is useful, but also points to a failure of any health system / internet resources to provide this. The LLM _HAS_ empowered the patient to act on his own health, which is undeniably a good thing. Not sure about seeing the LLM as a companion.

FeepingCreature 2y ago
It seems to me what the LLM adds is that it is the sensible algorithm which flags up results needing urgent action in a growing set of everyday domains.
djmips 2y ago
The human like conversation urging to go to the ER was particularly useful in this instance. I am not saying I don't fear for it's mistakes but clearly it's ability to communciate in natural language is something to not take for granted.
Out_of_Characte 2y ago
To be fair, This is what AI is good at. No matter what problem you're trying to solve, AI will provide a solution. In this case, lab result analysis was entirely based around standard care protocols that LLM is really good at regurgitating back to you. Yeah sure, anyone could probaly promt feed this into a homeopathy solution which would have killed the patient as per their own predisposed will. You could argue a standard programmatic diagnostic evaluation would be better but its not entirely clear wether human decision making improves based on webMD above an agitated Chatgpt urging you to seek professional help. And now that I think about it more, no one except doctors and AI could reliably improve diagnosis based on a picture and lab results side by side. So if your healthcare system doesn't provide a response then chatgpt might actually be the closest neighbour in time of need.
tim333 2y ago
It has the benefit of existing and saving the author as opposed to some hypothetical algorithm that doesn't.

aantix 2y ago

It’s possible to now get plausible diagnoses through an LLM. For which you can further discuss with your doctor. 1. Get your DNA fully sequenced for $200 from Nebula. 2. Download your .cram file. 50gb+ 2a. Or if you have a 23andme profile, just request to download your raw data. Use that output file. 3. Use WGS Extract to generate a datafile from the cram file of the SNPs and genotypes. 4. Zip that output file. Upload to a ChatGPT session. 5. This enables you to ask questions about your specific genetic profile. Bring your findings to your doctor. Discuss their plausibility. It may surface a solution that they hadn’t thought of.

FeepingCreature 2y ago
> WGS Extract Good god that install script. This is it, this is the tool that AppImage was created for.
- aantix 2y ago
  Pull requests welcomed.
  - FeepingCreature 2y ago
    Might throw it into an AI later.
  - FeepingCreature 2y ago
    Okay I tried to get Sonnet to do it for like two hours and I give up, sorry.
lm28469 2y ago
You might as well piss on the floor, take a picture of the puddle, upload it to chatgpt and ask it if you'll develop cancer between 2033 and 2037, you'd probably get the same amount of hallucination.
- aantix 2y ago
  No. Maybe if you abandon all logic. With an LLM, we’re trying to efficiently search the entire space using as many granular, personal attributes as possible. We’re trying to find plausible hypotheses. Especially those that haven’t been considered. The final determination and action is still a partnership between you and your doctor.

quantumwoke 2y ago

I read this post with my wife (medical doctor) and we agreed that this breathless post missed the mark a bit. ChatGPT gave exactly the advice from a Google search for low platelets and rash. A call to any doctor, nurse practitioner or urgent care would have resulted in the same outcome with arguably more trust. The fact that the author trusted ChatGPT more for some reason (AI hype?) seems immaterial. The hyperbole of statements like a minor cut with low platelets = death or having "no platelets" (both false) solidified it - hype over substance.

Toutouxc 2y ago
She didn’t trust ChatGPT more, ChatGPT was just available when the doctor was not.
- quantumwoke 2y ago
  But there is an ER, urgent care, etc. available at most if not all times? Google is also available and would have accomplished the same result.
  - FeepingCreature 2y ago
    Google for "low platelet" sure, if you already know that's important which she did not. The hard part here was entirely noticing that there was an urgent problem.
    - quantumwoke 2y ago
      As multiple people in this thread have commented, most providers give you a result, a red highlight of the abnormal result, and a reference range. We don't know exactly what the post author received of course, but it's pretty likely that low platelets were called out.
      - FeepingCreature 2y ago
        The critical missing info is "your platelets are low, keep an eye open for red spots on your skin that spread."

atonse 2y ago

A friend of mine had gotten an imaging test done recently, and had to wait 7 days to have her doctor review it. Meanwhile, she got the report and was paralyzed with worry by some of the words (like high risk for ____, etc). I feel like this is an area where AI/LLMs/whatever can actually help triage test results to tell doctors "hey you really should look at this test result first, it looks concerning" - this would happen in a way that you can't do with other bloodwork (which returns numbers on a scale). Most radiology reports are just written words, so LLMs could potentially use that to triage and help alert the care provider to prioritize it, so patients aren't sitting there worried for days on end until a doc analyzes it.

quantumwoke 2y ago
Question to which I don't have the answer: does an instant LLM response that says you may have cancer, infection or some other malady based on a report alleviate your suspicions? Or would you rather wait for a measured discussion with a professional? Personally speaking, I might be fooled into contacting my doctor inappropriately citing a false positive from DrGPT which seems inefficient.
unixfg 2y ago
My previous PCP used a system that would tell me my results are in, but I wasn’t allowed to view them until the doctor called me to talk about it.
- atonse 2y ago
  Right and in this case the doc hadn’t called in many days which I feel was negligent on their part, leaving the patient to self analyze.
thomasfedb 2y ago
Arguably the issue in your friend’s case is providing the patient with a document that’s not designed for them. Radiology reports are written with a particular audience in mind. They are also written with a particular medicolegal perspective, which the intended audience will appreciate. I often give my patients copies of their results/reports, which gives me an opportunity to explain them. If we are going to send reports to patients directly, maybe they need to be written differently? Who should pay for that different report to be written/checked? We already have AI tools for prioritising the order some tests are processed in (e.g. which X-Rays the radiologist looks at first). But once the report is written the author has a responsibility to ensure any urgent result is escalated. As a requester (I order tests), if I result needs urgent action within days or less, I expect a phone call to myself or another doctor in the practice.

sixQuarks 2y ago

How terrible is our healthcare system? There should be automatic alerts when a blood test returns dangerous levels like this

bethanymarz 2y ago
i agree!

aredox 2y ago

One could have done exactly the same thing with expert systems we had in the 60s. Or a checklist. Or a reference book. Far more reliable, no risk of hallucination.

lblume 2y ago
> Far more reliable, no risk of hallucination. Only as reliable as the information contained in the system. The whole point of an LLM is to agglomerate as much information as possible with little manual intervention which causes them to both be a) far more intelligent and knowledgeable than any old-school symbolic expert system, and b) also more prone to biases and hallucinations.
- aredox 2y ago
  Red spots on the skin -> coagulation problems is fairly basic medical knowledge. Even a cursory Google search would be enough to get that answer.
jodrellblank 2y ago
I don't have an expert medical system from the 1960s and an IBM 360 to run it on. Or a checklist [that I know is relevant]. Or a reference book [that I know is relevant, and know where to look in it, and what to look for]. What then?

maxymoos 2y ago

Oof, you don't go down to zero platelets without something gone seriously off the rails. Seems like it got caught right in time, but wishing for the best in the follow-up. This being said, a problem with blood tests is that a layperson won't know right off the bat if a value outside of the normal range is ok or a life-threatening issue. I understand it might introduce a lot of complexity for labs and that there's some level of "big picture analysis" involved that will require some human intervention, but even just a color-coded line for WBC/RBC, hemoglobin and platelets could already go a long way, as OP's case demonstrates.

quantumwoke 2y ago
These have existed for decades, although it might not always be surfaced. My provider gives me the reference range with every blood test and a red line for abnormal so I can know immediately where to start looking.

rom1v 2y ago

As a non-native Ensligh speaker, I asked ChatGPT what the ER acronym means: Emergency Room (I guessed E was for "Emergency" after reading your story, but I didn't know about the 'R'). AI is also helpful to parse the story about how AI is helpful.

Diti 2y ago

What the author should have done, as soon as they saw the physician had not yet looked at the results, is to immediately go to a pharmacy and show them the results. I’m glad AI has been useful this time, but pharmacists are experts too (and would tell you if they are not sure of something, instead of confabulating).

boole1854 2y ago
According to the story, the ChatGPT conversation that led to the ER visit happened on a Sunday. In my part of the world, all local pharmacies are closed on Sundays, so going to a pharmacy and showing the results would not have been an option.
Toutouxc 2y ago
That’s interesting, that wouldn’t occur to me at all. Is that a thing where you live? Going to the pharmacy to get diagnosed? (with something more complicated than a runny nose)
nick3443 2y ago
Really? In the USA? Wouldn't they say "sorry I'm not your doctor, do you have a prescription for something that needs dispensing?"

itkovian_ 2y ago

Story is good example of a why there's no "killer app" for llms. They are the killer app. There's no stack to this tech. People don't want to admit this because of the massive concentration of power that becomes clear after you accept this.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
It's not an either / or though, this is a generalized LLM (app being a chatbot), there's also specialized LLMs for things like writing code, prose, etc.
maxwell 2y ago
What's defensible? LLMs seem like gunpowder artillery to last decade's moats.
tim333 2y ago
The concentration of power isn't that bad as there are about half a dozen rival llms including open source.
- itkovian_ 2y ago
  All competitive open models today share a common property; someone spent a large amount of money to train them and then released the model for free. I don't understand why the argument continues to be we will have a rich ecosystem of base open source models; unlike opensource ai which is individuals donating time, opensource ai requires someone to donate very large amounts of capital.
- npteljes 2y ago
  They are open source in the way Android is open source. The actual results are open source indeed, but the culture and the chain isn't, so, if the people who run the projects decide that they are not open anymore, they won't be. And so, the projects will stop, as there will be nobody to release the newer versions. Same as how Android could maybe maintained indefinitely, but not improved in a way that it is right now.

vaporwario 2y ago

Wasn't this revealed as a fraud/joke like 2 months ago? [Edit: Callout: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1glttmh/i_asked_chatgpt_to_write_like_a_reddit_post_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1glttmh/i_asked_ch... Original Post: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1glqv2o/chatgpt_saved_my_life_and_im_still_freaking_out/lvynygp/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1glqv2o/chatgpt_sa... ]

djmips 2y ago
source?
- vaporwario 2y ago
  So I couldn't find the specific post I was thinking of off hand, and there seems to be about a dozen or so hits on various forum-type sites like Quora/Reddit etc. So... yeah I don't know, maybe it is real? But there has been an instance of someone using an LLM to make a story about an LLM saving their life. So maybe this one is real. Maybe it is not? Who knows. Reality is kind of mushy these days.
  - vaporwario 2y ago
    Additional notes here, the author of the article in this topic clearly indicates on her page that she writes alongside "Taylor Script", her AI counterpart. So now the line is even more explicitly blurred. An AI definitively was involved in the creation of this content... so now the question is, to what degree does the content relate back to real world events? Only the author knows I guess.
    - FeepingCreature 2y ago
      This of course goes for pretty much every personal story ever posted here.
    - bethanymarz 2y ago
      see the addendum at the bottom of the blog: https://hardmodefirst.xyz/chatgpt-saved-my-life-no,-seriously,-im-writing-this-from-the-er https://hardmodefirst.xyz/chatgpt-saved-my-life-no,-seriousl...

keiferski 2y ago

I've been re-watching House lately and I can't help but constantly think that a LLM would be excellent at diagnostics. At least in the sense of, "the patient has displayed XYZ symptoms, the test results have XYZ data, and ergo the following conditions are likely. Especially in the more obscure interactions and second-order effects.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Medical experts have done teardowns of House episodes and most of what happens in the series wouldn't happen in real life, that is, diagnoses are better than how they are depicted there.
- keiferski 2y ago
  Oh yeah I'm sure it's not super accurate, I just mean the specific task of diagnosing a patient would seem to benefit from a LLM-like piece of software.
  - gsck 2y ago
    But surely this could just be done with a constraint software, with better accuracy and less likelihood of making something up?
    - keiferski 2y ago
      Possibly but in my experience LLMs are more useful for brainstorming and generating original ideas than “being accurate” all of the time. Hence my idea that they could be useful in diagnosing difficult conditions.
    - wholinator2 2y ago
      Yeah, it's a trade off between certainty and creativity. Constraint software would be all certainty which, if it contained all the required information, would be the perfect system. But we don't have "all the information", or at least i haven't seen anyone claim so. So some degree of out-of-box creativity is required to catch more obscure correlations and strangeness. I think AI is just about as certain as previous systems, but with a big boost to the creativity aspect. It's also free. I can imagine the omnidiagnoser would be a closely held trade secret worth billions and thus absolutely not free to the public.

1970-01-01 2y ago

Yes it did. Let's not only praise ChatGPT because it said the right thing at the right time. ChatGPT told you how to stay alive, and the ER team did the work to keep you alive. Both systems were critical in the save.

bethanymarz 2y ago
Agree. Both of these were critically important components.

vaporwario 2y ago

Wasn't this revealed as a fraud/fake post from Reddit like 2 months ago?

djmips 2y ago
Link?
- bethanymarz 2y ago
  Not a fraud. Hi. It me. Still in the hospital right now
  - djmips 2y ago
    Hey there. Hope you get something figured out! I'm rooting for you.
deleted 2y ago
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arafatamim 2y ago

Last time I uploaded a medical report it outright refused to provide any analysis

sarchertech 2y ago

What happens when someone asks ChatGPT does medical advice and it misses something fatal? My guess is that the end result is that companies are going to tune their models to default to telling people to go to the ER.

DangitBobby 2y ago
Unless they are advertised as medical practitioners, I don't see how they could possibly be liable for bad medical advice. You can't sue your friend or dad for bad medical advice. Maybe you can if they claim themselves to be a licensed medical practitioner you'd have a shot at a successful lawsuit.
- sarchertech 2y ago
  You don’t have to claim you are a licensed medical professional to be sued for medical advice that harms someone. You just need to present your advice in a way that a reasonable person would assume that you have some kind of medical expertise. Based on the confident manner with which all LLMs present their answers and based on the fact that people are clearly using LLMs for their medical expertise, I think it would be pretty easy to go after one for giving medical advice that caused actual damages.

rafram 2y ago

> Next, ChatGPT suggested I ask a physician for some bloodwork. That’s when I remembered—I’d already received my lab results (unceremoniously, via email) late last night. One result was abnormal, I mentioned to ChatGPT. This is the point at which you call your doctor.

GTP 2y ago
She tried, but the point was that the doctor wasn't available at that moment.
- bethanymarz 2y ago
  yup. about 2 hours had passed from when i left a note to my doctor (on a sunday) and ultimately decided to go into the ER

Clubber 2y ago

AI is extremely good at finding patterns quickly. Even without AGI, this will be extremely useful. I kinda feel like AGI and replacing developers is a distraction to the power AI/ML already has available.

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iLoveOncall 2y ago

I'm sure the opposite story also already exists, with people overdosing on medicine on the advice of ChatGPT.

tinyhouse 2y ago

This is likely to get downvoted, but in my experience with the health care system in America, I'd prefer consulting ChatGPT over ~50% of the doctors. Too many doctors who I have no idea how they graduated from med school, and even worse, advocate for solutions that maximize profits. If I can provide one advice is to always question your doctors. Get multiple opinions on serious issues, and educate yourself like this person did. Come prepared to doctor visits and don't be afraid to challenge them if they tell you something that contradicts what you learned.

dathinab 2y ago

the really sad part here is that even without any fancy AI a lot of unusual blood results can be reliably detected and flagged as urgent or emergency i.e. he shouldn't had to have to consult ChatGPT in this case through then given how good people can be to convince themself that they shouldn't call help even if they really need it (or the opposite) ChatGPT might really help there

justlikereddit 2y ago

This one could be twenty years old "Dr Google saved my life" It's a very rudimentary chain of medical reasoning and doesn't really need an LLM to conclude that low platelets and petechiae is bad news

bethanymarz 2y ago
the difference was that i didn't know to put two and two together on my own at the time i was anchoring on digestive issues and hadn't thought too much about the bloodwork results

voidUpdate 2y ago

> New bruises without injury = your blood is not clotting properly I can't see any mention at all of bruises being a symptom in the article, did I miss that bit? Also if you're going to fill an article with ai-generated images, can't you at least photoshop in some correct text instead of getting an AI to try and writing the text for you? "Honestly? chatgpt convunced me." isn't awful, but "Ancôoidions, your instructions." is completely incomprehensible to me

wartijn_ 2y ago
If I search on that page for “Ancôoidions” or “convunced” I don’t get any results.
- voidUpdate 2y ago
  The 6th image on the page, of a woman lying in a hospital bed, has a speech bubble with garbled ai-generated text inside of it, and the next image has a classic-style walking robot, half submerged into a rug, saying similarly garbled text
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

sepositus 2y ago

> Needless to say, something is deeply broken in our healthcare system. As someone currently experiencing multiple unexplained systems and getting shuffled around to experts who continue to push appointments further and further back, I can't agree more. I've been using AI a lot lately, and some of these specialists I have actually met with are often surprised at how much knowledge I came in with (granted, I've always been this way, even before AI, it's just now even easier). But yeah, I had a similar but much less extreme case where I had tests come back, and my primary didn't even look at it for four days. Luckily, I was able to supplement and resolve the (minor) issue myself after talking it over with AI.

pwr22 2y ago

Lots of gushing about AI but I'm not really too interested in that.... more about what's up with your missing platelets! I'm assuming it's not at all a good thing to suddenly not have any without any prior history of things related to this? Hope everything works out okay in the end :).

pknerd 2y ago

My Mom was in the ICU back in 2024 due to lung and heart issues. I wouldn't say I blindly followed what GPT suggested but it definitely helped to understand lap reports, ECG, and other imageries to understand doctors' lingo

Mikhail_K 2y ago

The dual blogpost "ChatGPT cost me my life" wasn't written for the obvious reason

xigoi 2y ago

This is why we need AI to be open. Imagine if ChatGPT had forced her to watch a five-minute advertisement before each query – which is going to happen in the near future.

lr1970 2y ago

If this story narrative is true as described in the article this is a ground for reporting the primary care physician to the state board for a review. I am not saying it is a malpractice per se, but a clear fail of the doctor's practice. All modern EMR systems (most popular in US is Epic) _automatically_ flag all the results that are out of normal range. A physician assistant should be alerted to this fact and take appropriate actions. Sitting on ER grade emergency for two days and then telling a patient it will take another 3 days to review the results is unacceptable.

jazoom 2y ago
I disagree. Doctors can't be expected to be available 100% of the time. The only doctor to see this patient's result was the pathologist (or should have been before being sent off to the requesting doctor). It had not yet been handed over to the requesting doctor in a fail-proof manner. The pathology company I send my samples to contacts my clinic to ensure we received urgent results. This it's important because there's no guarantee the message ever arrived in the doctor's inbox. If you work in tech you should know this to be the case. The only way to ensure timeliness is for the pathology company to contact the patient directly if they can't verbally hand over to the requesting doctor.

fnord77 2y ago

chatGPT killed me (no seriously, I'm writing this from the morgue)