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ChatGPT Health

• zxor3 10mo ago
  I really feel like no one should trust open ai with their health data.
  • threecheese 10mo ago
    I barely trust them with any personal info. Are we (HN crowd) biased in a way that will cause us to miss out? I wonder if we are insiders - having a privileged perspective given our industry is on the front lines - or if we’re just becoming jaded.
    • wrs 10mo ago
      I missed out on having my transactions publicly posted on Venmo, too. I’m just a slow adopter, I guess.
  • sda2 10mo ago
    no one should trust any EMR or organization with their health data, it'll all be leaked eventually.
• usefulposter 10mo ago
  >purpose-built encryption and isolation Repeated 2x without explanation. Good start. --- >You can further strengthen access controls by enabling multi-factor authentication Pushing 2fac on users doesn't remove the need for more details on the above. --- >to enable access to trusted U.S. healthcare providers, we partner with b.well >wellness apps—like Apple Health, Function, and MyFitnessPal Right...? --- >health conversations protected and compartmentalized Yet OAI will share those conversations with enabled apps, along with "relevant information from memories" and your "IP address, device/browser type, language/region settings, and approximate location"? (per https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001036-what-is-chatgpt-health https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001036-what-is-chatgpt...)
• minimaxir 10mo ago
  > Health is designed to support, not replace, medical care. It is not intended for diagnosis or treatment. I suspect that will be legally-tested sooner than later.
  • observationist 10mo ago
    As long as the liability precedents set by prior case law and current regulations hold, there should be no problem. OpenAI and the hordes of lawyers working for and with them will have ensured that every appropriate and legally required step has been taken, and at least for now, these are software tools used by individuals. AI is not an agent of itself or the platform hosting it; the user's relative level of awareness of this fact shouldn't be legally relevant as long as OpenAI doesn't make any claims to the contrary. You also have to imagine that they've got their zero guardrails superpowered internal only next generation bot available to them, which can be used by said lawyer horde to ensure their asses are thoroughly covered. (It'd be staggeringly stupid not to use their AI for things like this.) The institutions that have artificially capped levels of doctors, strangled and manipulated healthcare for personal gain, allowed insurance and health industries to become cancerous - they should be terrified of what's coming. Tools like this will be able to assist people with deep, nuanced understanding of their healthcare and be a force multiplier for doctors and nurses, of which there are far too few. It'll also be WebMD on steroids, and every third person will likely be convinced they have stereochromatic belly button cancer after each chat, but I think we'll be better off, anyway.
  • plasticeagle 10mo ago
    It also doesn't make any sense. It's like self-driving cars that require you to pay attention at all times anyway.
  • yks 10mo ago
    And just like the CSAM of Grok, it will be exempt from consequences
  • intended 10mo ago
    How is this NOT a class action suit in the making?
• thisislife2 10mo ago
  I pity the doctors who will now have to deal with such self-diagnosed "patients". Wonder if General Medicine doctors will see a drop in patient, as AI convinces you to see a specialist with its diagnosis?
  • satvikpendem 10mo ago
    > researchers found that searching symptoms online modestly boosted patients’ ability to accurately diagnose health issues without increasing their anxiety or misleading them to seek care inappropriately [...] the results of this survey study challenge the common belief among clinicians and policy-makers that using the Internet to search for health information is harmful. [0] For example, "man Googles rash, discovers he has one-in-a-million rare disease" [1]. > Ian Stedman says medical professionals shouldn't dismiss patients who go looking for answers outside the doctor's office - even if they resort to 'Dr. Google.' > "Whenever I hear a doctor or nurse complain about someone coming in trying to diagnose themselves, it boils my blood. Because I think, I don't know if I'd be dead if I didn't diagnose myself. You can't expect one person to know it all, so I think you have to empower the patient." [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8084564/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8084564/ [1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/man-googles-rash-discovers-he-has-one-in-a-million-disease-1.4339872/man-googles-rash-discovers-he-has-one-in-a-million-rare-disease-1.4339923 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/man-googles-rash-discover...
    • BeetleB 10mo ago
      Indeed. My doctor likes it when people search the Internet - as long as they come to him before doing anything drastic.
      • observationist 10mo ago
        If there's a reasonable audit trail for the doctor to verify that valid differential reasoning was done that they can quickly verify, there's relatively few downsides and lots of upsides for them.
  • 10mo ago
• XorNot 10mo ago
  America can't afford public healthcare and now can't afford RAM so OpenAI can offer a bad version of healthcare.
  • RodgerTheGreat 10mo ago
    To be more precise: America could easily afford healthcare, but American elites regularly accept pathetically tiny bribes to pretend that universal healthcare is impossible. They also accept pathetically tiny bribes to allow companies like OpenAI to do whatever they please without meaningful legal consequence, so OpenAI is able to keep getting away with shipping products that cannot work as advertised and will kill people.
• tummler 10mo ago
  Absolutely not.
• ZeroCool2u 10mo ago
  Yeah, gotta say I'm not enthusiastic about handing over any health data to OpenAI. I'd be more likely to trust Google or maybe even Anthropic with this data and that's saying something.
• mrstone 10mo ago
  Not a chance.
• satvikpendem 10mo ago
  Another nail in the coffin for apps that depend on AI APIs because the AI companies themselves are working on products using their own APIs (unless you can make the UX significantly better). UX now seems like the prime motivator when building apps.
  • TeMPOraL 10mo ago
    LLMs themselves are the coffin for most apps, because by its very nature, AI subsumes products. UX is not going to be a prime motivator, because the product itself is the very thing that stands between user and the thing they want. UX-wise, for most software, it's better for users to have all these products to be reduced to tool calls for AI agents, accessible via a single interface. The very concept of product itself is limiting users to interactions allowed by the product vendor[0] - meanwhile, used as tools for AI agents allows them to be combined in ways user need[1]. -- [0] - Something that, thanks to move to the web and switching data exchange model from "saving files" to "sharing documents", became the way for SaaS businesses to make money by taking user data hostage - a raison d'être for many products. AI integration threatens that. [1] - And vendors would very much like users to not be able to. There's going to be some interesting fights here, as general-purpose AI tools are an existential threat to most of the software industry itself.
    • satvikpendem 10mo ago
      Depends on the product itself. For example I use an LLM for tracking calorie data by telling it or providing a picture of the food I had, and it does a web search to find those details. The problem is it doesn't actually remember past meals, so I wrapped this API call in a simple app that just tracks the calorie numbers like a traditional app. Just having an LLM is not the right UX for the vast majority of apps.
      • TeMPOraL 10mo ago
        Right. But what if you dropped the human-facing UI, and instead exposed the backend (i.e. a database + CRUD API + heavy domain flavoring) to LLM as a tool? Suddenly you not only get a more reliable recognition (you're more likely to eat something that you've eaten before than completely new), but also the LLM can use this data to inform answers to other topics (e.g. diet recommendations, restaurant recommendations), or do arbitrary analytics on-demand, leveraging other tools at its disposal (e.g. Python, JS, SQL, Excel are the most obvious ones), etc. Suddenly the LLM would be more useful at maintaining shopping lists and cross-referencing with deals in local grocery stores - which actually subsumes several classes of apps people use. And so on. > Just having an LLM is not the right UX for the vast majority of apps. I argue it is, as most things people do in software doesn't need to be hands-on. Intuition pump: if you can imagine asking someone else - a spouse, a friend, an assistant - to use some app to do something for you, instead of using the app yourself, then turning that app into a set of tools for LLM would almost certainly improve UX. But I agree it's not fully universal. If e.g. you want to browse the history of your meals, then having to ask an LLM for it is inferior to tapping a button and seeing some charts. My perspective is that tool for LLM > app when you have some specific goal you can express in words, and thus could delegate; conversely, directly operating an app is better when your goal is unclear or hard to put in words, and you just need to "interact with the medium" to achieve it.
• egorfine 10mo ago
  > you can sign up for the waitlist Waitlist: 404 page not found.
  • 6510 10mo ago
    the future is now
  • chairhairair 10mo ago
    Vibedeployments Embarrassing
  • moffkalast 10mo ago
    Just like regular healthcare then I see.
• rsyring 10mo ago
  "Join the Waitlist” button -> 404. :o/
  • leobg 10mo ago
    Vibe coded…. /s
  • nadis 10mo ago
    It looks like it's fixed now but had the same initial experience.
• password54321 10mo ago
  yikes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524382 [Teenager died of overdose 'after ChatGPT coached him on drug-taking']
  • EForEndeavour 10mo ago
    An estimated 371,000 people die every year following a misdiagnosis, and 424,000 are permanently disabled. https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/33/2/109?rss=1 https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/33/2/109?rss=1 Admittedly I am basing this on pure vibes: I'd bet that adding AI to the healthcare environment will, on balance, reduce this number, not increase it.
    • ares623 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      • akoboldfrying 10mo ago
        Would you like to propose a different metric for estimating whether a given tool benefits society?
        • soraminazuki 10mo ago
          [flagged]
  • emodendroket 10mo ago
    The article is paywalled but appears to concern abusing a cocktail of kratom, alochol, and xanax. I don't really think that's the same. Also, this feature isn't really about making ChatGPT start answering medical questions anyhow, since people are already doing that.
• bicepjai 10mo ago
  This is going to be fun to watch :)
  • BigTTYGothGF 10mo ago
    Really? Because I was thinking it was going to be tragic.
    • 6510 10mo ago
      It could be interesting, the medical industry is fine with everyone being deficient in everything. And then people miraculously get ill?
      • hermanzegerman 10mo ago
        The tinfoil hat seems to be too tight around your head
        • 6510 10mo ago
          You are right, what was I even thinking.. I just asked ChatGPT if eating fat will cause obesity and it went all in on counting calories. The standards are hilariously low. Lots of doctors use google and we both know google doesn't work. It will probably tell you humans are made from froot loops, chips, cola and quarter pounders - but do count those calories or it gets to big! Maybe they can train it on Japanese text.
• BeetleB 10mo ago
  What could possibly go wrong?
• roger_ 10mo ago
  I personally don’t care who has access to my health data, but I understand those who might. Either way, I’m excited for some actual innovation in the personal health field. Apple Health is more about aggregating data than actually producing actionable insights. 23andme was mostly useless. Today I have a ChatGPT project with my health history as a system prompt and it’s been very helpful. Recently I snapped a photo of an obscure instrument screen after taking a test and was able to get more useful information than what my doctor eventually provided (“nothing to worry about”, etc.) ChatGPT was able to reference papers and do data analysis which was pretty amazing, right from my phone (e.g fitting my data to a model from a paper and spitting out a plot).
  • MattDaEskimo 10mo ago
    I'm sorry, but seriously? How could you not care who has your health data? I think the more plausible comment is "I've been protected my whole life by health data privacy laws that I have no idea what the other side looks like". Quite frankly, this is even worse as it can and will override doctors orders and feed into people's delusions as an "expert".
    • roger_ 10mo ago
      I’d rather have all my health data be used in a way that can actually help me, even with a risk of a breach or misuse, than having it in a folder somewhere doing nothing.
      • SiempreViernes 10mo ago
        You're supposed to share it with a doctor you trust, if nobody qualified asked for it it's probably because it's no longer relevant.
        • roger_ 10mo ago
          I’ve had mixed experiences with doctors. Often times they’re glancing at my chart for two minutes before an appointment and that’s the extent of their concern for me. I’ve also lived in places where I don’t have a choice in doctor.
• coffeebeqn 10mo ago
  High risk high reward? Or just the level of regulation companies can expect in the year 2026 that they’re not afraid to take this path?
• vimda 10mo ago
  This reads like desperation to get a headline more than an actual product, especially when half the links don't even work
  • barbazoo 10mo ago
    I heard the links are lazily auto vibe coded when enough people click on them /s
    • lionkor 10mo ago
      I made something like that https://github.com/lionkor/ai-httpd https://github.com/lionkor/ai-httpd
      • barbazoo 10mo ago
        Love it!
• jostmey 10mo ago
  The old chat gpt models scanning the nih pub med repositories with proper prompting (e.g. …backed by randomized control trial data) was an amazing health care tool. The stripped down cheaper versions today are junk and I’ve had to start relying on grok :-( I’m not convinced OpenAI can make this work
• paulgrimes1 10mo ago
  Here’s something: my chatGPT quietly assumed I had ADHD for around 9 months, up until October 2025. I don’t suffer from ADHD. I only found out through an answer that began “As you have ADHD..” I had it stop right there, and asked it to tell me exactly where it got this information; the date, the title of the chat, the exact moment it took this data on as an attribute of mine. It was unable to specify any of it, aside from nine months previous. It continued to insist I had ADHD, and that I told it I did, but was unable to reference exactly when/where. I asked “do you think it’s dangerous that you have assumed I have a medical / neurological condition for this long? What if you gave me incorrect advice based on this assumption?” to which it answered a paraphrased mea culpa, offered to forget the attribute, and moved the conversation on. This is a class action waiting to happen.
  • dunk010 10mo ago
    Perhaps you do ;-)
  • rafram 10mo ago
    > nine months previous It likely just hallucinated the ADHD thing in this one chat and then made this up when you pushed it for an explanation. It has no way to connect memories to the exact chats they came from AFAIK.
    • efilife 10mo ago
      or had this info injected into its system prompt and was doing everything not to reval it. ChatGPT gets fed your IP address* and approximate location in its system prompt but won't ever admit it and will come up with excuses. Just ask it "search the web to find where im at". It will tell you the country you are in, sometimes down to the city. If you follow up with "how did you know my approximate location?" it will ALWAYS tell you it guessed it. Based on past conversations (that never happened), based on the way you talk, it can even hallucinate that you told it in this exact conversation. *not entirely sure. I t seems to frequently hallucinate the address
      • 10mo ago
• mikelitoris 10mo ago
  https://giphy.com/gifs/the-office-mrw-d10dMmzqCYqQ0 https://giphy.com/gifs/the-office-mrw-d10dMmzqCYqQ0
• zsolt224 10mo ago
  LLMs were actually not that great so far in the preventative side / risk prediction. They are very good if you already have the disease but if you are trending there they were chill about it. The better way would be to first calculate the risks via deterministic algos and then do differential diagnosis. So something that specialized doc would do. This is an example of an online tool, that does it like that: https://www.longevity-tools.com/liver-function-interpreter https://www.longevity-tools.com/liver-function-interpreter
• seltzered_ 10mo ago
  Something to note here is that just yesterday (January 6 2026) the FDA announced changes around regulation of wearable & AI enabled devices: https://www.statnews.com/2026/01/06/fda-pulls-back-oversight-ai-enabled-devices-wearables/ https://www.statnews.com/2026/01/06/fda-pulls-back-oversight... (" FDA announces sweeping changes to oversight of wearables, AI-enabled devices The changes could allow unregulated generative artificial intelligence tools into clinical workflows")
  • incognito124 10mo ago
    I think it's only a matter of time before OpenAI starts doing hardware (phones, watches, vr)
    • anshumankmr 10mo ago
      I present to you https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/ https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/
• lionkor 10mo ago
  This was expected. People are going to be convinced that this AI knows more than any doctor, will self medicate, and will die, harm others, their kids, etc. Great work, can't wait to see what's next.
  • jdthedisciple 10mo ago
    In my experience GPT is uber-careful with health related advice. Which makes me think it's likely on the user if what you said actually happened...
    • lionkor 10mo ago
      Please look at the post. This is about a GPT which is designed to give you health advice, with all hallucinations, miscommunication, bad training data, lack of critical thinking (or, any thinking, obviously).
• jacekm 10mo ago
  There's "Ask ChatGPT" overlay at the bottom of the page, so I asked "how risky is giving my medical data to OpenAI?" Interestingly ChatGPT advised caution ;) In short it said: 1. Safer than standard AI chats, 2. Not as safe as regulated healthcare systems (it reminded that OpenAI is not regulated and does not follow e.g. HIPAA), 3. Still involves inherent cloud risks.
• defphysics 10mo ago
  There’s a lot of negativity here. I’ll just say I’m extremely glad I had ChatGPT when I was going through some health issues last year.
  • cyberpunk 10mo ago
    Yep same, with the caveat that any actionable advice requires actual research from reliable sources afterwards (or at least making it cite sources). i mean; i kinda get the concerns about misleading people but … are people really that dumb? okay if it’s telling you to drink more water, common sense. If you’re scrubbing up to perform an at home leg amputation because it misidentified a bruise then that’s really on you.
    • sensanaty 10mo ago
      > are people really that dumb? Yes, absolutely. The US has measles back in rotation because people are "self-educating" (aka taking to heart whatever idiocy they read online without a 2nd thought), and you think people self diagnosing with a sycophant sentence generator is anything but a recipe for disaster?
      • fragmede 10mo ago
        If we build a bridge over this river, sure, people can get across the river, but what about if the bridge fails and people fall into the water! Let's not build the bridge instead.
      • ogogmad 10mo ago
        ChatGPT frequently pushes back against the things I say. I think you can dial down the level of sycophancy.
  • probably_wrong 10mo ago
    I know someone who used ChatGPT to diagnose themselves with a rare and specific disease. They paid out of pocket for some expensive and intrusive diagnostics that their doctor didn't want to perform and it came out, surprise, that they didn't have this disease. The faith of this person in ChatGPT remains nonetheless just as high. I'm constantly amazed at the attitude that doctors are useless and that their multiple years of medical school and practical experience amounts to little more than a Google search. Or as someone put it, "just because a doctor messed up once it doesn't mean that you are the doctor now".
• plasticeagle 10mo ago
  This is absolutely going to kill people. In a country that had even a modicum of regulation around providing healthcare this would be illegal.
  • oldjim798 10mo ago
    Completely agree. It is deeply irresponsible for OpenAI to release this product. They should held liable for malpractice for every incorrect statement and advice provided by it.
  • cheald 10mo ago
    I'm certain it will kill people, but medical error already kills a huge number of people - the exact number is heavily disputed, but in the US the lower bound is in the tens of thousands annually.
  • jdthedisciple 10mo ago
    You know what else kills people? Cars, planes, food, scooters, sports, cold, heat, electricity, medication, ...
  • Dilettante_ 10mo ago
    It's also absolutely going to save people. The question is what the acceptable (and the actual) ratio is.
    • soraminazuki 10mo ago
      The Sacklers said the same about OxyContin.
• theptip 10mo ago
  Integration with Function is a great use-case. There is a huge category of pre-diagnostic health questions (“Medicine 3.0” as Attia puts it) where personalization and detailed interpretation of results is important, yet insurance typically won’t cover preemptive treatment. Not to mention that doctors generally don’t have time to explain everything. Recently I’ve been doing my own research and (important failsafe) running the conclusions by my doctor to validate. Tighter integration between physician notes, ChatGPT conversations, and ongoing biomarkers from e.g. function and Apple Health would make it possible to craft individualized health plans without requiring six-figure personal doctor subscriptions. A great opportunity to improve the status quo here. Of course - as with software, quality control will be the crux. We don’t want “vibe diagnosing”.
  • zsolt224 10mo ago
    What you described already exists: - for liver: https://www.longevity-tools.com/liver-function-interpreter https://www.longevity-tools.com/liver-function-interpreter - for insulin resistance: https://www.longevity-tools.com/glucose-metabolism-interpreter https://www.longevity-tools.com/glucose-metabolism-interpret... etc
• fnoef 10mo ago
  I’m kind of torn on this. From one side, I can’t seem to trust doctors any more. I recently had a tooth removed (by the advice of two different doctors), in a claim that it will resolve my pain, which it did not, and now 3 different doctors don’t know what’s causing my pain. Most doctor advice boil down to drink some water and take a painkiller, while glancing for 15 seconds at my medical history before they dedicate me 7 minutes, after which they move to yet another patient. So compared to this, AI that can analyze all my medical history, and has access to the entirety of medical researches that are publicly available, could be a very good tool to have. But at the same time technofeudalism, dystopia, etc.
  • __lain__ 10mo ago
    This is part of the reason that alternative medicine has become so popular, there are definitely still some trustworthy doctors out there, but I share the same experience as you where I feel left with no recourse but to take care of things myself after seeing multiple doctors who make it very clear that they have no interest or time to listen to me.
  • sallveburrpi 10mo ago
    All the downsides you listed can be solved by public open source models. The ones we have are pretty good already and I would hope that they only get better in the near future. Once you can it on your machine you can safely give it all your data and much more. Of course i would still like a human doctor but it might be a better tool for personal research before you see an expert than what we had in the past.
  • whalesalad 10mo ago
    most doctors - like most mechanics - are the worst debuggers in humankind. I once went to the UCSF er 2x in the same weekend for an issue. On day one, I was told to take some ibuprofen and drink water - nothing to worry about. I went home, knowing this was not a solution. Day two I returned to the ER because my situation had gotten 10x worse. The (new) doctor on day 2 said "we need to resolve this asap" and I was moved into a room where they gave me a throat-numbing breating apparatus and then shoved a massive spinal tap needle in my throat to drain 20ml of fluid from behind my tonsil. I happened to bump into the doctor from the previous day on my way out and gave him a nice tap on the shoulder saying, thanks for all the help, doc. UCSF tried to bill me 2x for this combined event, but I told them to get fucked due to the negligence on day one. The billing issue disappeared. I had a Jeep that I took into the shop 2, 3, 4 times for a crazy issue. The radio, seat belt chime, and emergency flashers all become possessed at the same time. Using my turn signal would cause the radio to cut in and out. My seat belt kept saying it was disconnected. No one could fix it. What was the issue? A loose ground on the chassis that all of those different systems were sharing. https://www.wranglerforum.com/threads/2015-rubicon-with-electrical-gremlins.1531017/#post-23329737 https://www.wranglerforum.com/threads/2015-rubicon-with-elec... These are just two examples from my life, but there are countless. I just do everything myself now, because I trust no one else.
• crmd 10mo ago
  I would not trust a company with no path to profitability with my medical health records, because they are more likely to do something unethical and against my interests, like selling insights about me to other companies, out of desperation for new revenue streams.
• kenjackson 10mo ago
  ChatGPT has become an indispensable health tool for me. It serves as a great complement to my doctor. And there's been at least two cases in our house where it provided recommendations that were of great value (one possibly life saving and the other saving from an unnecessary surgery). I think that specialized LLMs will eventually be the front-line doctor/nurse.
• flipbrad 10mo ago
  "we built foundational protections (...) including (...) training our models not to retain personal information from user chats" Can someone please ELI5 - why is this a training issue, rather than basic design? How does one "train" for this?
  • data-ottawa 10mo ago
    Could be telling the memory feature not to remember these specific details
  • SAI_Peregrinus 10mo ago
    I assume they want to retain all other info from user chats, and they're using an LLM to classify the info as "personal" or not.
  • ipnon 10mo ago
    I used to work in healthtech. Information that can be used to identify a person is regulated in America under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). These regulations are much stricter than the free-for-all that constitutes usage of information in companies that are dependent on ad networks. These regulations are strict and enforceable, so a healthcare company would be fined for failing to protect HIPAA data. OpenAI isn't a healthcare provider yet, but I'm guessing this is the framework they're basing their data retention and protection around for this new app.
  • dust42 10mo ago
    This is just marketing nonsense. You don't have to train models to not retain personal information. They simply have no memory. In order to have a chat with an LLM, every time the whole conversation history gets reprocessed - it is not just the last answer / question gets send to the LLM but all preceding back and forth. But what they do is exfiltrate facts and emotions from your chats to create a profile of you and feed it back into future conversations to make it more engaging and give it a personal feeling. This is intentionally programmed.
    • kgeist 10mo ago
• namesbc 10mo ago
  Such a dystopian nightmare we live in now. The US is cutting our actual healthcare services to subsidize this shit so billionaires can become trillionares while the rest of us suffer
  • ctoth 10mo ago
    Source?
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• sys32768 10mo ago
  Most doctors are just people who had a strong ability to pass tests and finish medical school. Most of the ones I've worked with aren't passionate about their specialty or their patients, and their neglect and mistakes show it.
  • throwaway314155 10mo ago
    > Most doctors are just people who had a strong ability to pass tests and finish medical school. This is a tautology. “Most doctors are just (doing lots of work there) people who had the ability to meet the prerequisites for…becoming a doctor.” Are doctors fallible? Of course. Is there room for improvement with regard to LLM’s? Hopefully. Does that mean there’s reason to spread general distrust in doctors? Fuck no. Until now they were the only chance you had at getting health care.
• nadis 10mo ago
  Was anyone able to get past the 404 page to actually join the waitlist or try this? I hit the 404 and seems like most folks on X did too, e.g. replies to Greg Brockman's announcement here: https://x.com/gdb/status/2008984705723719884 https://x.com/gdb/status/2008984705723719884
  • nadis 10mo ago
    Argh of course I posted this and then when I tried one more time after the page finally worked. Ignore the above; the page seems to work now (points to a waitlist).
    • Dilettante_ 10mo ago
      Fun fact: There's a saying for this in german: 'Vorführeffekt', or 'Demonstration Effect'. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Vorf%C3%BChreffekt https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Vorf%C3%BChreffekt
• option 10mo ago
  this is great. I've been using AI for health optimization (exercise routine, diet, etc.) based on my biomarkers for a while now. Once ChatGPT recommended me a simple solution to a chronic health issue - a probiotic with a specific bacteria strand. And while I used probiotics with before, apparently they have all different stands of bacteria. The one ChatGPT recommended me really worked.
• i2oc 10mo ago
  I trust they considered the bias in medical research that exists in their training. I wonder if OpenAI will implement morbidity & mortality (M&M) rounds to learn from the mistakes and missed diagnosis. Based on the reports of various failings on the safety front, I sure hope users will take that into account before they get advice to take 500g of aspirin.
• schwarzrules 10mo ago
  I understand all the chatter about LLMs hallucinating, or making assumptions, or not being able to understand or provide the more human/emotional element of health care. But the question I ask myself is: is this better than the alternative? if I wasn't asking ChatGPT, where would I go to get help? The answers I can anticipate are: questionably trustworthy web content; an overconfident friend who may have read questionably trustworthy web content; my mom who is referencing health recommendations from 1972. And as best I can imagine, LLMs are going to likely to provide health advice that's as good but likely better than any of those alternatives. With that said, I acknowledge that people are likely more inclined to trust ChatGPT more like a licensed medical provider, at which point the comparison may become somewhat more murky, especially with higher severity health concerns.
  • timeon 10mo ago
    > if I wasn't asking ChatGPT, where would I go to get help? Is this serious question? Can't you call/visit doctor?
    • jofzar 10mo ago
      I'm Australian, but from what I understand from my friends in America, no. They only go when it's urgent/very worrying.
      • zdragnar 10mo ago
        If you don't need to be physically seen to make a determination, most hospitals and networks operate phone lines where you can speak with a nurse who will triage symptoms and either recommend home remedies or an appointment as needed. I'm not sure if this has switched entirely to video calls or not, but when it became popular it was a great way to avoid overloading urgent care and general physicians with non-urgent help requests.
        • beaugunderson 10mo ago
          As someone who was recently injured and waited three months to see a specialist in Seattle, these lines were not helpful ("yes, you should make an appointment"). The only way I was able to see someone was to write a script that blew up my phone when I got a cancellation window email (the first two I missed even though I responded within 30 seconds).
• qgin 10mo ago
  I help take care of my 80-ish year old mother. ChatGPT figured out in 5 minutes the reason behind a pretty serious chronic problem that her very good doctors hadn't been able to figure out in 3 years. Her doctors came around to the possibility, tested out the hypothesis, and it was 100% right. She's doing great now (at least with that one thing). That's not to say that it's better than doctors or even that it's a good way to address every condition. But there are definitely situations where these models can take in more information than any one doctor has the time to absorb in a 12-minute appointment and consider possibilities across silos and specialties in a way that is difficult to find otherwise.
  • mangamadaiyan 10mo ago
    Something to think about: perhaps the problem is with the duration of the appointment, and the difficulty of getting one in the first place? Elsewhere in the world, doctors can and do spend more than 12 minutes figuring out what's wrong with their patients. It's the healthcare system that's broken, and it _can_ be fixed without resorting to chatgpt. That it won't is the reality, though
    • TeMPOraL 10mo ago
      Can't really compete with LLMs on duration of attention - SOTA LLMs can ingest years of research on the spot, and spend however long you need on your case. No place on Earth has that many specialists available to people (much less affordable); you'd have to have 50% of the population become MDs, and that would still cover just one sub-specialty of one specialization.
    • uyzstvqs 10mo ago
      GP sessions being around 20 minutes is pretty standard in North American and European countries. You can't have standard hour-long GP sessions, as it'd become impossible to make a timely appointment, no matter which system.
      • yurishimo 10mo ago
        Can confirm having experienced both the USA and Dutch systems now. In both countries is my visit only about 20 minutes + another 15-30 sitting in the lobby because they doctor is always running behind schedule. In theory, the Dutch system will take care of your more quickly for "real" emergencies as their "urgent care" (spoedpost) is heavily gate kept and you can only walk in to a hospital if you're in the middle of a crisis. I tried to walk into the ER once because I needed an inhaler and they told me to call the call the hotline for the urgent care... this was a couple of months after I moved. That said, I much prefer paying €1800/year in premiums with a €450 deductible compared to the absolute shitshow that is healthcare in the USA. Now that I've figured out how to operate within the system, it's not so bad. But when you're in the middle of a health crisis, it can be very disorienting to try and figure out how it all works.
• partiallypro 10mo ago
  I've already been using ChatGPT to evaluate my blood results and give me some solutions for my diet and workouts. It's been great so far without any special model.
• pier25 10mo ago
  Isn't it illegal to provide health advice without a license?
  • hamdingers 10mo ago
    The endless parade of health influencers says no.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway132448 10mo ago
  It’s so foreign to me that anyone would want this in their life.
  • halapro 10mo ago
    When was the last time you had to deal with healthcare for anything other than visible/testable issues?
    • throwaway132448 10mo ago
      For the last 7-8 years.
• abdelhousni 10mo ago
  Brave new world we live in...
• mlmonkey 10mo ago
  My uncle had an issue with his balance and slurred speech. Doctors claimed dementia and sent him home. It kept becoming worse and worse. Then one day I entered the symptoms in ChatGPT (or was it Gemini?) and asked it for the top 3 hypotheses. The first one was related to dementia. The second was something else (I forget the long name). I took all 3 to his primary care doc who had kept ignoring the problem, and asked her to try the other 2 hypotheses. She hesitantly agreed to explore the second one, and referred him to a specialist in that area. And guess what? It was the second one! They did some surgery and now he's fine as a fiddle.
  • jskrn 10mo ago
    Glad to hear your uncle improved! Would you mind sharing the other two hypotheses and what the diagnosis ultimately was?
    • mlmonkey 10mo ago
      The first was "dementia" (or something related to it, I don't remember the exact medical term). The second was something to do with fluid in some spinal column (I am sorry once again, I do not remember the medical term; they operated on him to drain it, which is why I remember it). I don't remember the third one, unfortunately.
      • kypen 10mo ago
        Perhaps a CSF leak due to a dural sack tear in the spine? Was his symptom only having headaches while standing? Happened to my wife. 6 weeks of absolute hell. On second thought — the opposite. A bulge/blockage of CSF?
        • antisthenes 10mo ago
          Apparently, as I've recently learned due to a debilitating headache, CSF pressure (both high and low) can cause a whole host of symptoms, ranging from mild headache and blurred vision to coma and death. It's pretty wild that a doctor wouldn't have that as a hypothesis.
• digitcatphd 10mo ago
  At first I was reading this like 'oh boy here we go, a marketing ploy by ChatGPT when Gemini 3 does the same thing better', but the integration with data streams and specialized memory is interesting. One thing I've noticed in healthcare is for the rich it is preventative but for everyone else it is reactive. For the rich everything is an option (homeopathics/alternatives), for everyone else it is straight to generic pharma drugs. AI has the potential to bring these to the masses and I think for those who care, it will bring a concierge style experience.
• tasty_freeze 10mo ago
  Many people in the comments are worried about laypeople using this for medical advice. I'm worried that hospital admins will see this as a way to boost profit margins. Replace all the doctors by CNAs with ChatGPT. Yes, doctors are in short supply, are overworked, and make mistakes. The solution isn't to get rid of them, but to increase the supply of doctors.
• SoleilAbsolu 10mo ago
  Zero mention of actual compliance standards or HIPAA on the launch page of a product that is supposed to interconnect with medical records other health apps! No thanks...
• ShakataGaNai 10mo ago
  AI in health - makes sense. OpenAI in health - I'm reticent. As someone who pays for ChatGPT and Claude, and uses them EVERYDAY... I still am not sure how I feel about these consumer apps having access to all my health data. OpenAI doesn't have the best track record of data safety. Sure OpenAI business side has SOC2/ISO27001/HIPAA compliance, but does the consumer side? In the past their certifications have been very clearly "this is only for the business platform". And yes, I know regular consumer don't know what SOC2 is other than a pair of socks that made it out of the dryer.... but still. It's a little scary when getting into very personal/private health data. Gattaca is supposed to be a warning, not a prediction. Then again neither was Idiocracy, yet here we are.
• Dlanv 10mo ago
  Joined the wait-list. Can't wait. AI already saved me from having an unnecessary surgery by recommending various modern-medicine (not alternative medicine) alternatives which ended up being effective. Between genetics, blood stool and urine tests, scans (ultrasound, MRI, x-ray, etc), medical history... Doctors don't have time for a patient with non trivial or non obvious issues. AI has the time.
• felineflock 10mo ago
  "Medical attention is all you need."
• ghxst 10mo ago
  Unfortunately, I feel like I'm in the minority here, but AI has been really helpful to me and my doctor visits when it comes to preparing for a ~10-minute appointment that historically always felt like it was never long enough. I can sit down with an LLM for as long as I need and discuss my concerns and any potential suggestions, have it summarize them in a structure that's useful for my doctor, and send an email ahead of the appointment. For small things, she doesn't even need me to come in anymore and a simple phone call to confirm is enough. With the amount of pressure the healthcare system is under, I think this approach can free up a lot of valuable time for her to spend with the patients who need it most.
• k2xl 10mo ago
  ChatGPT arguably saved my fathers life two weeks ago. He was in a rehab center after breaking his hip and his condition suddenly deteriorated. While waiting for the ambulance at the rehab center, i plugged all his health data from is MyChart and described the symptoms. It accurately predicted (in its top two possibilities) C Diff infection. Fast forward two days, ER has prescribed in general antibiotics. I pushed the doctors to check for C Diff and sure enough he tested positive for it - and they got him on the right antibiotics for it. I think it was just in time as he ended up going to the ICU before he got better. Maybe they would have tested for C Diff anyway, but definitely made me trust ChatGPT. Throughout his stay after every single update in his MyChart I copy and paste the pdf to the long running thread for his health. I think ChatGPT health- being able to automatically import this directly will be a huge game changer. This is probably my number one use case of AI is health and wellness. My dad is getting discharged tomorrow (to a different rehab center, thankfully)
• monooso 10mo ago
  Handily appearing next to this story on the front page of HN: "Health care data breach affects over 600k patients" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46528353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46528353
• o999 10mo ago
  AI apocalyptic hegemony Expectations : I, Robot Reality: Human extinction after ChatGPT kills everyone with halucinated medical advice, and lives alone..
  • Dilettante_ 10mo ago
    I mean, that's Darwin in action, right?
• toss1 10mo ago
  >>Designed with privacy and security at the core ...Health is built as a dedicated space with added protections for sensitive health information and easy-to-use controls. Good words at a high level, but it would really help do have some detail about the "dedicated space with added protections" How isolated is the space? What are the added protections? How are they implemented? What are the ways our info could leak?, and many more. I wish I didn't have to be so skeptical of something that should be a great good providing more health info to more people, but the leadership of this industry really has, "gone to the dark side".
• fogzen 10mo ago
  These discussions pit ChatGPT against doctors — but we can combine them! Doctors can use it to improve their diagnostics and treatment options.
  • ghxst 10mo ago
    And patients can use it to improve communication with their doctors (which, given the short duration of an appointment can make a big difference.)
• zephyreon 10mo ago
  Using AI to analyze health data has such a huge potential upside, but it has to be done locally. I use [insert LLM provider here] all the time to ask generic, health-related questions but I’m careful about what I disclose and how I disclose it to the models. I would never connect data from my primary care’s EHR system directly to one of these providers. That said, it’ll be interesting to see how the general population responds to this and whether they embrace it or have some skepticism. I’m not confident we’ll have powerful/efficient enough on-device models to build this before people start adopting the SaaS-based AI health solutions. ChatGPT’s target market is very clearly the average consumer who may not necessarily care what they do with their data.
• dash2 10mo ago
  Specifically as someone in the UK, where doctors are free but extremely hard to get hold of, this is quite interesting to me.
  • RobinL 10mo ago
    Another interesting aspect is that the NHS app makes all your detailed health history (doctors notes, scan results etc.) available to you as the patient. Which in turn means you have the option of feeding it into ChatGPT. This feels potentially very valuable and a nice way of working around issues with whether doctors themselves are allowed to do it. I'm not sure this applies to every surgery, but certainly my dad had access to everything immediately when he had a scan.
    • sjw987 10mo ago
      Out of curiosity, do you know from when this data started being assigned? Is it just from when you install the NHS app and create some form of login or will it have everything there? I hadn't heard of this before.
      • lawtalkinghuman 10mo ago
        The actual data is being held by GPs, hospitals, other secondary care providers, and pharmacies. Enough of those providers use systems that all conform to a bunch of common standards and APIs that the NHS app can get that data (and the idea is it puts pressure on the remainder to switch to systems that are accessible). The capabilities the NHS app offers will depend on what subset of the functionality the GP practice has implemented (on, in reality, the commercial vendor that makes the software they use). NHS has pretty reasonable developer documentation which explains most of the high level pieces of the system - https://digital.nhs.uk/developer/guides-and-documentation https://digital.nhs.uk/developer/guides-and-documentation
• mherrmann 10mo ago
  I strained my groin/abs a few weeks ago and asked ChatGPT to adjust my training plan to work around the problem. One of its recommendations was planks, which is exactly the exercise that injured me. My cleaning lady's daughter had trouble with her ear. ChatGPT suggested injecting some oil into it. She did and it became a huge problem, so that she had to go to the hospital. I'm sure ChatGPT can be great, but take it with a huge grain of salt.
  • Dilettante_ 10mo ago
    This is one of the main dividing lines wrt LLM usage and dangers: Not just believing what it tells you and finding hard sources before acting. For some people this is obvious, so much so that they wouldn't even mention it, while others have seen only the hype and none of the horror stories.
• jdthedisciple 10mo ago
  The problem with dr appointments is that too often, physicians dont actually think carefully about your case. It's like they one-shot it. This is why I've had my dr change their mind between appointments, having had more time to review the data. Or I get 3 different experts giving me 3 different (contradicting!) diagnoses. That's also why I always hesitate listening to their first advice.
  • timeon 10mo ago
    I see many comments like this in here. Where is this so common? I'm not from US but I had impression that health-care while expensive, it is good. If I assume most comments come from US then it is just expensive. I cannot imagine doctor evaluating just one possibility.
• PeterStuer 10mo ago
  I woder wether this will have the same pitfalls as regular ChatGPT. The latter implicitly assumes all your questions are personal. It seems to have no concept of context for its longer term retentions. Certainly for health, non accute things seem matter a lott. This is why yoir personal doctor that has known you for decades will spot things beyond your current symptoms. But ChatGTP will uncritically retain from that time you helped your teacher relative build her lesson plans that you "are a teacher in secondary education" or that time you helped diagnose a friends car trouble that you "drives a high performance car" just the same as your regular "successfully built a proxmox datacenter". With health there will be many users aking on behalve of or helping out an elderly relative. I wonder whether all those 'diagnoses' and 'issues' will be correctly attributed to the right 'patient' or just be mixed together and assumed to be all about 'you'.
• nadam 10mo ago
  I am amazed at the false dichotomy (ChatGPT vs. Doctors) discussed in the comments. Let's look at it from the perspective of how a complex software is developed with a team of software engineers and with AI assistance. There is GitHub, Slack discussions, Pull Request, reviews, agents, etc... Why a patient's health cannot be seen this way? Version controlled source code -> medical records, health data Slack channels -> discussion forum dedicated to one patient's health: among human doctors (specialists), AI agents and the patient. In my opinion we are in the stone age compared to the above.
  • klardotsh 10mo ago
    I think you vastly overestimate the number of orgs using “agents” at all in software development, let alone as an active part of the review process for code, and ESPECIALLY the number who consider such bots equally valuable contributors to humans. They are tools, they are sometimes useful tools in particular domains and on particular teams, but your comment reads like one that assumes they are universally agreed upon already, and thus that the health industry has a trustee example they could follow by watching our industry. I firmly disagree with that basis.
    • nadam 10mo ago
      Maybe. But I am working with these agents and I see the sophisticated patterns using LLMs, using ground truth data and human experts working together. It could be much more effective than 'patient asking chatgpt' vs. 'general doctor one-shotting a problem without AI assistance and enough context'.
    • nadam 10mo ago
      You put the "agent" word into apostrophes as if I use it as a marketing buzzword. No. An agent is an LLM in a loop with memory usage, with file system access, etc, which is usually more effective than just using an LLM as is, especially if you orchestrate these agents and subagents in a good way. In my opinion using the word 'ChatGPT' (a specific user-facing LLM brand) in these discussions is much more buzzwordy than using the word agent.
• Squarex 10mo ago
  Gemini helped diagnoze me with eosinophilic esophagitis. I have had problems with swallowing all my life and doctors kept dismissing it as a psychological problem. I think there is a great space with ai medical help.
  • qiine 10mo ago
    > eosinophilic esophagitis And how do you threat that ?
    • Squarex 10mo ago
      There are pills and a minor balloon dilation. The point is I would not be threated without it. Now I can go with my girlfriend for a dinner. That would be a huge stress before that.
• fuckinpuppers 10mo ago
  Is it cancer? Oh no wait, you’re right it’s heart disease! Oh it’s not heart disease? It’s probably cancer Rinse and repeat
• egorfine 10mo ago
  > ChatGPT Health is not yet available in the UK or EU Ah yes. Because in the EU you cannot actually steal people's data.
• sifix 10mo ago
  [dead]
• iLoveOncall 10mo ago
  Since there are a lot of positive comments at the top (not surprising given the astroturfing on HN), please watch this video from ChubbyEmu, a real doctor, about a case study from someone who self-diagnosed using AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU For every positive experience there are many more that are negative, if not life threatening or simply deadly.
  • akoboldfrying 10mo ago
    > For every positive experience there are many more that are negative On what basis do you make this assertion?
• energy123 10mo ago
  Doctors should be expected to use these tools as part of general competency. Someone I knew had herpes zoster on her face and the doctor had no idea and gave her diabetic medication. A five second inference with Gemini by me, uploading the picture only (after disabling apps activity to protect her privacy), and it said what it was. It's deplorable. And there's no way for this doctor to lose their job. They can keep being worse than Gemini Flash and making money.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• kachapopopow 10mo ago
  maybe the openai moat is the data we shared along the way. no seriously, openai seemingly lost interest in being the 'best' model - instead optimizing for other traits such as speech and general human likeness? there's obviously codex but from my experience it's slower and worse than the other big 2 in every single way: cost, speed and accuracy. codex does seem to be loved by vibe coders the most that don't really know how to code at all so maybe it is also what they're optimizing for and why it doesn't personally suit me. others might have better models, but openai has the users emotionally attached to the models at this point even if they know it or don't. there were several times I recommended switching and the response I got is that "chatgpt knows me better".
  • unsupp0rted 10mo ago
    GPT 5.2 High is the gold standard in code quality right now. The “Codex” models suck. Claude, even Opus, creates major side-effects and misses obvious root causes of bugs.
    • kachapopopow 10mo ago
      haven't done bug hunting with openai so cannot comment, but given the right tools opus can most definitely solve bugs as well. I think opus is special because it was trained explicitely on very strong reliance on such tools while gpt seems to "know" how things work a lot better reducing the need for tools. opus being able to dedicate a lot more parameters for these things make it a better model if you give it what it needs, but that's just my observation. it's also much faster as a bonus.
• fpauser 10mo ago
  I'd rather not talk to a commercial LLM about personal (health) details. Guess how they will/do try to make this completely overhyped chat bots profitable. OpenAI could sell relevant personal health related data to insurance companies, or maybe the hr department of your next job. Just saying...
• petterroea 10mo ago
  recommending people eat horse dewormer as a service here we go
• ihtef 10mo ago
  I always check my blood test and mrı results with ChatGPT before showing to Doctor. Doctor says same thing what ChatGPT says and it's giving more clear and detailed information. However we shouldn't trust chatgpt result 100%. It's just good to take an idea. Also we shouldn't trust any doctor 100%
  • logicallee 10mo ago
    I ran a part of your comment through ChatGPT, and it said you're typing on a Turkish keyboard or have it set as your language. Is this true?
    • ihtef 10mo ago
      Yes, correct!
    • davidmurdoch 10mo ago
      Wait. Why? What prompted this? The phrasing?
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      • usui 10mo ago
        > I always check my blood test and mrı results with ChatGPT MRI letters
    • Philipp2398 10mo ago
      I ran a part of your comment through Clause, and it said you're typing on a Hungarian keyboard or have it set as your language. Is this true?
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• dxuh 10mo ago
  I've had serious trouble with my knee and elbow for years and ChatGPT helped me immensely after a good couple dozen of doctors just told me to take Ibuprofen and rest and never talked to me for longer than 3 minutes. I feel like as with most things LLM there are many opponents that say "if you do what an LLM says you will die", which is correct, while most people that look positively towards using LLMs for health advice report that they used ChatGPT to diagnose something. Having a conversation with ChatGPT based on reports and scans and figuring out what follow-up tests to recommend or questions to ask a doctor makes sense for many people. Just like asking an LLM to review your code is awesome and helpful and asking LLM to write your code is an invitation for trouble.
• websiteapi 10mo ago
  the amount of people willing to delegate to chatgpt tells me in the near future only rich people will be able to speak with a real doctor. the current top comment about someone's uncle being saved due to chatgpt guidance says it all.
  • beezlebroxxxxxx 10mo ago
    Unfortunately, that's kind of already the case. The standard of care for wealthy people, who often purchase "Personal Medicine" services, can be astoundingly better than what is available to the general public. It's more like having a health team behind you than just a lone GP. They can push you through the system, get treatments, ask colleagues, and collaborate with other teams, way quicker.
• exabrial 10mo ago
  Going to a probabilistic system for something that can/should be deterministic sets off a lot of red flags. I’ve worked medical software packages, specifically a drug interaction checker for hospitals. The system cannot be written like a social media website… it has to fail by default, and only succeed when an exact correct solution was determined. This result must be repeatable given the same inputs. The consequence is people die.
  • exabrial 10mo ago
    Despite this, given that health care prices in the USA continue to accelerate from relentless government interference and regulation, perhaps if the deterministic side of things could be figured out, we could monumentally decrease cost and increase access.
  • nostrademons 10mo ago
    Health and medicine is very far from deterministic. Your drug interaction checker is deterministic because the non-determinism is handled at a higher level (the doctor / patient interaction) in the health care system. Individual patients often respond wildly differently to the same medicine even in the absence of drug interactions. Similarly the non-determinism in ChatGPT should be handled at a higher level. It can suggest possibilities for diagnosis and treatment, but you should still evaluate those possibilities with the help of a trained physician.
  • throwmeaway820 10mo ago
    a drug interaction checker can be deterministic, based on a static corpus of drug interaction data a diagnostic system should not necessarily be deterministic, because it always operates on incomplete data and it necessarily produces estimates of probability as an output
  • steveridout 10mo ago
    Human doctors are probabilistic systems.
    • encyclopedism 10mo ago
• lunias 10mo ago
  Might be useful if they start letting me write my own prescriptions or can send a robot to my house to run tests or perform surgery. Otherwise, I don't really see how this changes anything for me; the doctor - that I already have to see - should just check their analysis with AI on my behalf.
  • spongebobstoes 10mo ago
    Doctors should use AI, but they often don't. We can expect slow adoption. When it happens, the quality of AI will be determined by enterprise sales and IT. Right now, a patient can inject AI into the system by bringing a ChatGPT transcript to their doctor.
    • lpcvoid 10mo ago
      No, doctors shouldn't use llms. The second a doctor does this with me knowing is the moment I switch doctors.
• sotix 10mo ago
  My cousin just finished years of medical school, residency, and his first job as a psychiatrist. He opened up a private practice a year ago and has been working hard to acquire a client base. I fear this will destroy his livelihood. He can't compete on the convenience. To see him, a person has to reach him via phone or email, process their healthcare information, and then physically visit him. All while this tool has been designed to process health information, which can also speak out loud with the patient instantly. Sure he can prescribe medications, but many people he sees do not need medication. Even if the doctor is better, the convenience of this tool will likely win out. If America wants to take care of its people, it needs to tear down the bureaucracy that is our healthcare system and streamline a single payer system. Otherwise, doctors will be unable to compete with tools like this because our healthcare system is so inconvenient.
• lionkor 10mo ago
  All the Americans here arguing why this is a good thing, how your system is so flawed, etc. remember that this will be accessible to people in countries with good, free healthcare. This is going to be the alternative to going to a doctor that is 10 minutes by car away, that is entirely and completely free, and who knows me, my history, and has a couple degrees. People are going to choose asking ChatGPT instead of their local doctor who is not only cheaper(!!!) but also actually educated. People saying that this is good because the US system specifically is so messed up and useless are missing that the US makes up ~5% of the world's population, yet you think that a medical tool made for the issues of 5% of the population will be AMAZING and LIFE SAVING for the other 95%, more than harmful? Get a grip. Not to mention shitty doctors, which exist everywhere, likely using this instead of their own brains. Great work guys. I suspect the rationale at OpenAI at the moment is "If we don't do it, someone else will!", which I last heard in an interview with someone who produces and sells fentanyl.
  • sib 10mo ago
    >> This is going to be the alternative to going to a doctor that is 10 minutes by car away, that is entirely and completely free, and who knows me, my history, and has a couple degrees. Well then I suppose they'd have no need or motivation to use it, right?
    • lionkor 10mo ago
      They will because the grassroots marketing will be that its amazing, just like all the other AI tools
• TZubiri 10mo ago
  Was it approved by the FDA as a Medical Device?
  • soraminazuki 10mo ago
    Is FDA approval worth anything to consumers anymore? The way things are run today, OpenAI could buy any stamp of approval through money and appeasement.
    • TZubiri 10mo ago
      I was thinking more in terms of compliance, is it legal to sell medical tech without FDA certification? This is without getting into Physician licenses if we consider the product to be physician state advice.
      • soraminazuki 10mo ago
        Regulatory oversight of medical tech is important. But it's not because of the law, it's because it's a matter of life and death. The legality aspect becomes less interesting when there's no functioning regulatory framework that protects the people. Which is to say, OpenAI getting approval wouldn't make this any better if that approval isn't actually worth the paper it's written on.
• yoaviram 10mo ago
  This thread reads like an advertisement for ChatGPT Health. I came to share a blog post I just posted titled: "ChatGPT Health is a Marketplace, Guess Who is the Product?" OpenAI is building ChatGPT Health as a healthcare marketplace where providers and insurers can reach users with detailed health profiles, powered by a partner whose primary clients are insurance companies. Despite the privacy reassurances, your health data sits outside HIPAA protection, in the hands of a company facing massive financial pressure to monetize everything it can. https://consciousdigital.org/chatgpt-health-is-a-marketplace-guess-who-is-the-product/ https://consciousdigital.org/chatgpt-health-is-a-marketplace...
  • adam_patarino 10mo ago
    This. It’s the same play with their browser. They are building the most comprehensive data profile on their users and people are paying them to do it.
    • godzillabrennus 10mo ago
      Is this any worse than Google? Seems like the same business model.
      • antiframe 10mo ago
        Does Google have your medical records? It doesn't have mine.
        • godzillabrennus 10mo ago
          People email about their medical issues and google for medical help using Gmail/Google Search. So yes, Google has people's medical records.
          • idiotsecant 10mo ago
            If you hear me talking to someone about needing to pick up some flu medicine after work do you have my medical records?
• rgreeko42 10mo ago
  This is going to kill people
• DetectDefect 10mo ago
  "we’ve worked with more than 260 physicians" yet not a single one of their names is proudly featured in this article. Well, the article itself does not even have an author listed. Imagine trusting someone who doesn't even disclose their identity with your sensitive data.
• overgard 10mo ago
  I use it for health advice sometimes.. but.. doesn't this seem like a massive source of liability? Are they just assuming the investor dollars will pay for the lawyers?
• trevor-e 10mo ago
  I'm dealing with a severe health ailment with my cat right now and ChatGPT has been pretty invaluable in helping us understand what's going on. We've been keeping our own detailed medical log that I paste in with the lab and radiology results and it gives pretty good responses on everything so far. Of course I'm treating the results skeptically but so far it has been helpful and kept us more informed on what's going on. We've found it works best if you give it the raw facts and lab results. The main issue is that medicine and diseases come with so many "it depends" and caveats. Like right now my cat won't eat anything, is it because of nausea from the underlying disease, from the recent stress she's been through, from the bad reaction to the medicine she really doesn't like, from her low potassium levels, something else, all of the above? It's hard to say since all of those things mention "may cause nausea and loss of appetite". But to be fair, even the human vets are making their own educated guesses.
• SomaticPirate 10mo ago
  I had a friend who has now gotten several out of pocket MRIs essentially against medical advice because she believes her persistent headaches are from brain cancer. Even after the first MRI essentially ruled this out, she fed the MRI to chatGPT which basically hallucinated that a small artifact of the scan was actually a missed tumor and that she needed another scan. Thousands wasted on pointless medical expenses. Having friend's in healthcare, they have mentioned how common this is now. Someone coming in and demanding a set of tests based on chatGPT. They have explained that A, tests with false positives can actually be worse for you (triggers even more invasive tests) B, insurance won't cover any of your chatGPT requests. Again, being involved in your care is important but disregarding the medical professional in front of you is a great way to set yourself up for substandard care.
• bilsbie 10mo ago
  Local AI can’t come soon enough. My health should be between me and my AI. Keep corporations and government out of it.
• ltbarcly3 10mo ago
  My guess is that it is just chatgpt tuned to give the advice that gives the lowest possible liability to openai. Get ready to learn about the food pyramid, folks.
• iambateman 10mo ago
  No. Absolutely not. The government owes its people a certain duty of care to say “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” LLM’s are good for advice 95% of the time, and soon that’ll be 99%. But it is not the job of OpenAI or any LLM creator to determine the rules of what good healthcare looks like. It is the job of the government. We have certification rules in place for a reason. And until we can figure out how to independently certify these quasi-counselor robots to some degree of safety, it’s absolutely out of the question to release this on the populace. We may as well say “actually, counseling degrees are meaningless. Anyone can charge as a therapist. And if they verifiably recommend a path of self-harm, they should not be held responsible.”
  • wokedocsdotcom 10mo ago
    These doctors? Credentialed and all? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_c7CcVspfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_c7CcVspfI
  • ugh123 10mo ago
    Okay. How long should we wait until that happens?
  • dimitri-vs 10mo ago
    I wouldn't say the US gov has a good track record regarding it's "job" in healthcare.
    • juuular 10mo ago
      Hell of a lot better than without the government though. Read more history.
• dainiusse 10mo ago
  Openai is cooked. They can't compete with others so just experimenting on some side things...
• MattGrommes 10mo ago
  Not everyone who uses ChatGPT gets advice on harming or killing themselves, but some people sure do. And some act on it. Just as we don't necessarily want to eliminate a technology because of a small percentage of bad cases, we shouldn't push a technology just because of a small percentage of good anecdotes. This genie isn't going back in the bottle but I sure hope it ends up more useful than harmful. Which now that I write it down is kind of the motto of modern LLM companies.
• tsoukase 10mo ago
  Long before any LLM becomes useful to people/patients, it will become an indispensable tool for doctors, that are able to usefully evaluate and safely apply the feedback to carefully and specifically posed context. Currently doctors are gaining some value from LLMs but generally it is still small and of limited importance. "Amateur doctors on a keyboard" definitely have a lot to lose next to the possible benefit. Doctors use AI to diagnose and treat, people just to obtain more food for thought to discuss with their doctors while getting a sense of imaginary safety due to a feeling of having total knowledge about their condition.
• theshrike79 10mo ago
  This is a good thing, BUT we need a law requiring that all AI use by doctors has to go like this: 1) doctor writes down their own diagnosis based on the symptoms (or dictates, whatever) 2) diagnosis is saved, notarised, etc that it can't be changed afterwards 3) doctor receives AI-generated differntial diagnosis 4) now they can adjust their diagnosis, but the original still stays logged Why? Because the AI-generated response might direct the doctor's thinking subconsciously in unpredictable ways resulting in diagnosis done solely by AI in practice.
• kittikitti 10mo ago
  The amount of bullying, ridicule, and even threats of litigation just for suggesting something like this was phenomenal. Glad a Gatekeeper finally announces it so the neuron they trained on the masses signals compliance.