19 ms·

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

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 9mo ago
Glad to hear your uncle improved! Would you mind sharing the other two hypotheses and what the diagnosis ultimately was?
- mlmonkey 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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.
R_Man77 9mo ago
Since someone else asked and you said you didn't remember, do you think he may have had Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH)? And the surgery which he had may have been a VP shunt (ventricular-peritoneal) -- something to move fluid away from his brain? Quite a mouthful for the layman and the symptoms you are describing would fit. NPH has one of my favorite mnemonic in medicine for students learning about the condition, describing the hallmark symptoms as: "Wet, Wobbly and Wacky." Wet referring to urinary incontinence, Wobbly referring to ataxia/balance issues and Wacky referring to encephalopathy (which could mimic dementia symptoms).
- mlmonkey 9mo ago
  Now that you mention it, it may have been NPH. The thing is, I did the chatting with ChatGPT and handed the printout to the doc. Biology was never my strong suit, so my eyes glaze over when I see words like "Hydrocephalus" :-D
  - chinathrow 9mo ago
    You might find it in the chat history.
aurareturn 9mo ago
Thanks for sharing. I struggled with long-term undiagnosed issues for so long. It took me 15 years of trying with doctors until one did a colonoscopy and found an H.Pylori infection in 2018. Prescribed the right kind of antibiotics and changed my life. In hindsight, my symptoms matched many of the infection's. No doctor figured it out. So many doctors never bothered to conduct any tests. Many said it's in my head. Some told me to just exercise. I tried general doctors, specialists. At some point, I was so desperate that I went to homeopathy route. 15 years wasted. Why did it take 15 years for the current system? I'd bet that if I had ChatGPT earlier, it could have helped me in figuring out the issue much faster. When you're sick, you don't give a damn who might have your health data. You just want to get better.
- baq 9mo ago
  15 years of funding someone else’s pensions on healthcare dividends.
- suddenlybananas 9mo ago
  H. Pylori is like one of the most common infections there is. How did your doctors not look for that?
  - aurareturn 9mo ago
    No clue. But H Pylori can cause many different symptoms. Sometimes it has no symptoms and people don't notice. Anyways, that's why I'm so bullish on LLMs for healthcare.
  - bonesss 9mo ago
    Programmers have the benefit of being able to torture and kill our patients at scale (unit and integration testing), doctors less so. The diagnostic skills one hits in any given doctor may be relatively shallow, plus tired, overworked, or annoyed by a patients self expression… the results I’ve seen are commonly abysmal and care providers are never shocked by poor and misdiagnosis from other practitioners. I have some statistically very common conditions and a family medical history with explicit confirmation of inheritable genetic conditions. Yet, if I explain my problems A to Z I’m a Zebra whose female hysteria has overwhelmed his basic reasoning and relationship to reality. Explained Z to A, well I can’t get past Z because, holy crap is this an obvious Horse and there’s really only one cause of Horse-itis and if your mom was a Horse then you’re Horse enough for Chronic Horse-itis. They don’t have time to listen, their ears aren’t all that great, and the mind behind them isn’t necessarily used to complex diagnostics with misleading superficial characteristics. Fire that through a 20 min appointment, 10 of which is typing, maybe in a second language or while in pain, 6 plus month referral cycles and… presto: “it took a decade to identify the cause of the hoof prints” is how you spent your 30s and early 40s.
nomel 9mo ago
General doctors aren't trained for problem solving, they're trained for memorization. The doctors that are good at problem solving aren't general doctors.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- risyachka 9mo ago
  This. I wouldn't be surprised if AI was better than going to GP or many other specialists in majority of cases. And the issue is not with the doctors themselves, but the complexity of human body. Like many digestive issues can cause migraines or a ton of other problems. I am yet to see when someone is referred to gut health professional because of the migraine. And a lot of similar cases when absolutely random system causes issues in seemingly unrelated system. A lot of these problems are not life threatening thus just get ignored as they would take too much effort and cost to pinpoint. AI on the other hand should be pretty good at figuring out those vague issues that you would never figured out otherwise.
  - throwaway12093 9mo ago
    And speaking of migraines, even neurological causes can apparently be tricky: Around here, cluster headaches would go without proper diagnosis for about 10 years on average. In my case, it also took about 10 years and 3 very confused GPs before one would refer me to a neurologist who in turn would come up with the diagnosis in about 30 seconds.
  - zimpenfish 9mo ago
    > AI on the other hand should be pretty good at figuring out those vague issues that you would never figured out otherwise. Not least because it almost certainly has orders of magnitude more data to work with than your average GP (who definitely doesn't have the time to keep up with reading all the papers and case studies you'd need to even approach a "full view".)
- gmadsen 9mo ago
  You still need 2 deviations above the average college student to get to med school. As a rough proxy for intelligence. The bottom threshold for doctors is certainly higher than lawyers
gloomyday 9mo ago
That's a tip I recommend people to try when they are using LLMs to solve stuff. Instead of asking "how to..", ask "what alternatives are there to...". A top-k answer is way better, and you get to engage more with whatever you are trying to learn/solve.
- sschueller 9mo ago
  Same if you are coding, ask "Is it possible" not "How do I" as the second one will more quickly result in hallucinations when you are asking it for something that isn't possible.
  - actionfromafar 9mo ago
    "Is it possible" is the conservative choice if you don't want to get an explanation of something that in fact, cannot be done. But it seems "is it possible" also leads it into answering "no, it can't" probably modelling a bunch of naysayers. Sometimes, if you coax it a little bit, it will tell you how to do a thing which is quite esoteric.
Rebuff5007 9mo ago
I've heard a lot of such anecdotes. I'm not saying its ill-intentioned, but the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement. I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. How frequent are mis-diagnosis like this? How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcomes? Are there medical boards that are sending PSAs to help doctors improve common mis-diagnosis? Whats the role of LLMs in all of this?
- otabdeveloper4 9mo ago
  > ...this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement. So what? Am I supposed to clutch pearls and turn off my brain at the stopword now?
- MattRix 9mo ago
  The fact is that doctors are human, so they have cognitive biases and make mistakes and sometimes miss things, just like all other humans.
  - adventured 9mo ago
    Humans are extraordinarily lazy sometimes too. A good LLM does not possess that flaw. A doctor can also have an in-the-moment negatively impactful context: depression, exhaustion, or any number of life events going on, all of which can drastically impact their performance. Doctors get depressed like everybody else. They can care less due to something affecting them. These are not problems a good LLM has.
- threethirtytwo 9mo ago
  I get where you’re coming from. I would argue the mistakes doctors make and the amount of times they are wrong literally dwarfs the amount of anti vaxers in existence. Also the anti vax movement isn’t completely wrong. It’s now confirmed (officially) that the covid-19 vaccine isn’t completely safe and there are risks taking it that don’t exist in say something like the flu shot. The risk is small but very real and quite deadly. Source: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/12/myocarditis-vaccine-covid.html#:~:text=One%20rare%20but%20real%20risk,three%20days%20after%20a%20shot. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/12/myocarditis-v... This was something many many doctors originally claimed was completely safe. The role of LLMs is they take the human bias out of the picture. They are trained on formal medical literature and actual online anecdotal accounts of patients who will take a shit on doctors if need be (the type of criticism a doctor rarely gets in person). The generalization that comes from these two disparate sets of data is actually often superior to a doctor. Key word is “often”. Less often (but still often in general) the generalization can be an hallucination. Your post irked me because I almost got the sense that there’s a sort of prestige, admiration and respect given to doctors that in my opinion is unearned. Doctors in my opinion are like car mechanics and that’s the level of treatment they deserve. They aren’t universally good, a lot of them are shitty, a lot are manipulative and there’s a lot of great car mechanics I respect as well. That’s a fair outlook they deserve… but instead I see them get these levels of respect that matches mother Theresa as if they devoted their careers to saving lives and not money. No one and I mean no one should trust the medical establishment or any doctor by default. They are like car mechanics and should be judged on a case by case basis. You know for the parent post, how much money do you think those fucking doctors got to make a wrong diagnosis of dementia? Well over 700 for less than an hour of there time. And they don’t even have the kindness to offer the patient a refund for incompetence on their part. How much did ChatGPT charge?
threethirtytwo 9mo ago
[flagged]
- paulryanrogers 9mo ago
  Isn't there a risk doctors stop giving out a diagnosis for most cases? So you'll pay for their time then have to see 10 different ones before getting any idea what's wrong? Because they're avoiding the risk of a wrong diagnosis in all but the most obvious cases.
  - threethirtytwo 9mo ago
    The easy way to stop this is to charge less. 50 bucks. And have the patient sign something and have him affirm that his diagnosis is probabilistic and not fully reliable. They need to charge what they’re actually worth and what they are worth correlates with reliability. They also need to communicate the effective reliability to the patient. Instead they charge something like a thousand dollars for less than an hour of their time for a false yes or no diagnosis.
- websiteapi 9mo ago
  > The proper decorum here is if the doctor made the wrong diagnosis. All fees and causal charges made by the doctor must be fully refunded and paid for. It’s only fair given the premium they were originally given to make a false diagnosis. lol terrible idea. just as great as having so that the service you bought is entirely refunded if the code has a single bug.
  - threethirtytwo 9mo ago
    Well the issue here is that the bug can cause you to die or can fuck up your entire life. A software bug generally doesn’t do anything to you and you actually don’t pay much money for software. One false diagnosis from a doctor costs you thousands of dollars and fucks up your life. Remember mcas? The bug on the 737 max that forced Boeing to pay reparations? That’s the level of bullshit people are dealing with for doctors. Life altering stuff. This isn’t some chrome bug or smart phone bug. Therefore the penalties and repercussions of mistakes should be equivalent. If the diagnosis only costs 100 dollars or something, and I was told that the diagnosis was only a probability… I could accept a no refund policy in that case.
tamara_olive 9mo ago
That story says a lot about where the gaps really are. Most doctors aren’t lacking raw intelligence, they’re just crushed for time and constrained by whatever diagnostic playbook their clinic rewards. A chatbot isn’t magic insight, it’s just the only “colleague” people can brainstorm with for as long as they need. In your uncle’s case it nudged the GP out of autopilot and back into actual differential diagnosis. I’d love a world where physicians get protected time and incentives to do that kind of broader reasoning without a patient having to show up with a print‑out from Gemini, but until then these tools are becoming the second opinion patients can actually obtain.
ratelimitsteve 9mo ago
what was the second diagnosis?
tootie 9mo ago
I can give you the exact opposite anecdote for myself. Spent weeks with Dr Google and one or another LLMs (few years ago so not current SOTA) describing myself and getting like 10 wrong possibilities. Took my best guess with me to a doctor who listened to me babble for 5 minutes and immediately gave me a correct diagnosis of a condition I had not remotely considered. Problem was most likely that I was not accurately describing my symptoms because it was difficult to put it into words. But also I was probably priming queries with my own expected (and mistaken) outcomes. Not sure if current models would have done a better job, but in my case at least, a human doctor was far superior.
tsoukase 9mo ago
A cause that needs surgery is readily diagnosed with a Brain MRI. If the doctor didn't order one after symptoms of "balance and slurred speech" then it's not a success of AI but a lethal negligence of the doctor. AI is a substitute for bad doctors not (yet) for good ones.
- HDThoreaun 9mo ago
  The problem is that it is very difficult if not impossible for patients to know if they have a good doctor or a bad one.
  - tsoukase 9mo ago
    Then may be ask ChatGPT about the quality of a specific doctor first. There might exist reviews somewhere. It would be the most valuable information.
vanishingbee 9mo ago
What I see are people returning to the same categorical errors in medicine. Drawing medical conditions from an urn occasionally yields a true diagnostic, even more so if conditions are weighed in the urn according to their prevalence in society. But disease lottery is no medical practice. Two essential errors exist in medicine: 1. Delivering a wrong intervention. 2. Failing to deliver an intervention at the right time due to misdiagnosis. These are the sins of harm and distraction. The metric for judging a system is not whether it gets things right on one occasion, but whether it makes those mistakes on the others. Doctors err because people and institutions are imperfect, biology is messy, and human variability is immense. But the former can be attenuated by a plurality of opinions and greater resources (including time), while statistical systems are inherently vulnerable to the latter two. Language models hallucinate and deliver both essential errors - all while speaking in a very confident and convincing manner. What OpenAI is advertising is a system that nudges vulnerable people to abandon, distrust, ignore, or simply avoid seeking true medical practitioners to rely on a statistical system out of an unjustified, naive trust in the machine. As a reminder to those concerned with healthcare accessibility, picking the wrong solution to a problem for lack of a right one does not solve the problem. That reasoning was the basis of practices such as bloodletting and lobotomy. Time after time again, medical science teaches us the limits of this kind of thinking.

jskrn 9mo ago

Glad to hear your uncle improved! Would you mind sharing the other two hypotheses and what the diagnosis ultimately was?

mlmonkey 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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.

R_Man77 9mo ago

Since someone else asked and you said you didn't remember, do you think he may have had Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH)? And the surgery which he had may have been a VP shunt (ventricular-peritoneal) -- something to move fluid away from his brain? Quite a mouthful for the layman and the symptoms you are describing would fit. NPH has one of my favorite mnemonic in medicine for students learning about the condition, describing the hallmark symptoms as: "Wet, Wobbly and Wacky." Wet referring to urinary incontinence, Wobbly referring to ataxia/balance issues and Wacky referring to encephalopathy (which could mimic dementia symptoms).

mlmonkey 9mo ago
Now that you mention it, it may have been NPH. The thing is, I did the chatting with ChatGPT and handed the printout to the doc. Biology was never my strong suit, so my eyes glaze over when I see words like "Hydrocephalus" :-D
- chinathrow 9mo ago
  You might find it in the chat history.

aurareturn 9mo ago

Thanks for sharing. I struggled with long-term undiagnosed issues for so long. It took me 15 years of trying with doctors until one did a colonoscopy and found an H.Pylori infection in 2018. Prescribed the right kind of antibiotics and changed my life. In hindsight, my symptoms matched many of the infection's. No doctor figured it out. So many doctors never bothered to conduct any tests. Many said it's in my head. Some told me to just exercise. I tried general doctors, specialists. At some point, I was so desperate that I went to homeopathy route. 15 years wasted. Why did it take 15 years for the current system? I'd bet that if I had ChatGPT earlier, it could have helped me in figuring out the issue much faster. When you're sick, you don't give a damn who might have your health data. You just want to get better.

baq 9mo ago
15 years of funding someone else’s pensions on healthcare dividends.
suddenlybananas 9mo ago
H. Pylori is like one of the most common infections there is. How did your doctors not look for that?
- aurareturn 9mo ago
  No clue. But H Pylori can cause many different symptoms. Sometimes it has no symptoms and people don't notice. Anyways, that's why I'm so bullish on LLMs for healthcare.
- bonesss 9mo ago
  Programmers have the benefit of being able to torture and kill our patients at scale (unit and integration testing), doctors less so. The diagnostic skills one hits in any given doctor may be relatively shallow, plus tired, overworked, or annoyed by a patients self expression… the results I’ve seen are commonly abysmal and care providers are never shocked by poor and misdiagnosis from other practitioners. I have some statistically very common conditions and a family medical history with explicit confirmation of inheritable genetic conditions. Yet, if I explain my problems A to Z I’m a Zebra whose female hysteria has overwhelmed his basic reasoning and relationship to reality. Explained Z to A, well I can’t get past Z because, holy crap is this an obvious Horse and there’s really only one cause of Horse-itis and if your mom was a Horse then you’re Horse enough for Chronic Horse-itis. They don’t have time to listen, their ears aren’t all that great, and the mind behind them isn’t necessarily used to complex diagnostics with misleading superficial characteristics. Fire that through a 20 min appointment, 10 of which is typing, maybe in a second language or while in pain, 6 plus month referral cycles and… presto: “it took a decade to identify the cause of the hoof prints” is how you spent your 30s and early 40s.

nomel 9mo ago

General doctors aren't trained for problem solving, they're trained for memorization. The doctors that are good at problem solving aren't general doctors.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
risyachka 9mo ago
This. I wouldn't be surprised if AI was better than going to GP or many other specialists in majority of cases. And the issue is not with the doctors themselves, but the complexity of human body. Like many digestive issues can cause migraines or a ton of other problems. I am yet to see when someone is referred to gut health professional because of the migraine. And a lot of similar cases when absolutely random system causes issues in seemingly unrelated system. A lot of these problems are not life threatening thus just get ignored as they would take too much effort and cost to pinpoint. AI on the other hand should be pretty good at figuring out those vague issues that you would never figured out otherwise.
- throwaway12093 9mo ago
  And speaking of migraines, even neurological causes can apparently be tricky: Around here, cluster headaches would go without proper diagnosis for about 10 years on average. In my case, it also took about 10 years and 3 very confused GPs before one would refer me to a neurologist who in turn would come up with the diagnosis in about 30 seconds.
- zimpenfish 9mo ago
  > AI on the other hand should be pretty good at figuring out those vague issues that you would never figured out otherwise. Not least because it almost certainly has orders of magnitude more data to work with than your average GP (who definitely doesn't have the time to keep up with reading all the papers and case studies you'd need to even approach a "full view".)
gmadsen 9mo ago
You still need 2 deviations above the average college student to get to med school. As a rough proxy for intelligence. The bottom threshold for doctors is certainly higher than lawyers

gloomyday 9mo ago

That's a tip I recommend people to try when they are using LLMs to solve stuff. Instead of asking "how to..", ask "what alternatives are there to...". A top-k answer is way better, and you get to engage more with whatever you are trying to learn/solve.

sschueller 9mo ago
Same if you are coding, ask "Is it possible" not "How do I" as the second one will more quickly result in hallucinations when you are asking it for something that isn't possible.
- actionfromafar 9mo ago
  "Is it possible" is the conservative choice if you don't want to get an explanation of something that in fact, cannot be done. But it seems "is it possible" also leads it into answering "no, it can't" probably modelling a bunch of naysayers. Sometimes, if you coax it a little bit, it will tell you how to do a thing which is quite esoteric.

Rebuff5007 9mo ago

I've heard a lot of such anecdotes. I'm not saying its ill-intentioned, but the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement. I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. How frequent are mis-diagnosis like this? How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcomes? Are there medical boards that are sending PSAs to help doctors improve common mis-diagnosis? Whats the role of LLMs in all of this?

otabdeveloper4 9mo ago
> ...this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement. So what? Am I supposed to clutch pearls and turn off my brain at the stopword now?
MattRix 9mo ago
The fact is that doctors are human, so they have cognitive biases and make mistakes and sometimes miss things, just like all other humans.
- adventured 9mo ago
  Humans are extraordinarily lazy sometimes too. A good LLM does not possess that flaw. A doctor can also have an in-the-moment negatively impactful context: depression, exhaustion, or any number of life events going on, all of which can drastically impact their performance. Doctors get depressed like everybody else. They can care less due to something affecting them. These are not problems a good LLM has.
threethirtytwo 9mo ago
I get where you’re coming from. I would argue the mistakes doctors make and the amount of times they are wrong literally dwarfs the amount of anti vaxers in existence. Also the anti vax movement isn’t completely wrong. It’s now confirmed (officially) that the covid-19 vaccine isn’t completely safe and there are risks taking it that don’t exist in say something like the flu shot. The risk is small but very real and quite deadly. Source: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/12/myocarditis-vaccine-covid.html#:~:text=One%20rare%20but%20real%20risk,three%20days%20after%20a%20shot. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/12/myocarditis-v... This was something many many doctors originally claimed was completely safe. The role of LLMs is they take the human bias out of the picture. They are trained on formal medical literature and actual online anecdotal accounts of patients who will take a shit on doctors if need be (the type of criticism a doctor rarely gets in person). The generalization that comes from these two disparate sets of data is actually often superior to a doctor. Key word is “often”. Less often (but still often in general) the generalization can be an hallucination. Your post irked me because I almost got the sense that there’s a sort of prestige, admiration and respect given to doctors that in my opinion is unearned. Doctors in my opinion are like car mechanics and that’s the level of treatment they deserve. They aren’t universally good, a lot of them are shitty, a lot are manipulative and there’s a lot of great car mechanics I respect as well. That’s a fair outlook they deserve… but instead I see them get these levels of respect that matches mother Theresa as if they devoted their careers to saving lives and not money. No one and I mean no one should trust the medical establishment or any doctor by default. They are like car mechanics and should be judged on a case by case basis. You know for the parent post, how much money do you think those fucking doctors got to make a wrong diagnosis of dementia? Well over 700 for less than an hour of there time. And they don’t even have the kindness to offer the patient a refund for incompetence on their part. How much did ChatGPT charge?

threethirtytwo 9mo ago

[flagged]

paulryanrogers 9mo ago
Isn't there a risk doctors stop giving out a diagnosis for most cases? So you'll pay for their time then have to see 10 different ones before getting any idea what's wrong? Because they're avoiding the risk of a wrong diagnosis in all but the most obvious cases.
- threethirtytwo 9mo ago
  The easy way to stop this is to charge less. 50 bucks. And have the patient sign something and have him affirm that his diagnosis is probabilistic and not fully reliable. They need to charge what they’re actually worth and what they are worth correlates with reliability. They also need to communicate the effective reliability to the patient. Instead they charge something like a thousand dollars for less than an hour of their time for a false yes or no diagnosis.
websiteapi 9mo ago
> The proper decorum here is if the doctor made the wrong diagnosis. All fees and causal charges made by the doctor must be fully refunded and paid for. It’s only fair given the premium they were originally given to make a false diagnosis. lol terrible idea. just as great as having so that the service you bought is entirely refunded if the code has a single bug.
- threethirtytwo 9mo ago
  Well the issue here is that the bug can cause you to die or can fuck up your entire life. A software bug generally doesn’t do anything to you and you actually don’t pay much money for software. One false diagnosis from a doctor costs you thousands of dollars and fucks up your life. Remember mcas? The bug on the 737 max that forced Boeing to pay reparations? That’s the level of bullshit people are dealing with for doctors. Life altering stuff. This isn’t some chrome bug or smart phone bug. Therefore the penalties and repercussions of mistakes should be equivalent. If the diagnosis only costs 100 dollars or something, and I was told that the diagnosis was only a probability… I could accept a no refund policy in that case.

tamara_olive 9mo ago

That story says a lot about where the gaps really are. Most doctors aren’t lacking raw intelligence, they’re just crushed for time and constrained by whatever diagnostic playbook their clinic rewards. A chatbot isn’t magic insight, it’s just the only “colleague” people can brainstorm with for as long as they need. In your uncle’s case it nudged the GP out of autopilot and back into actual differential diagnosis. I’d love a world where physicians get protected time and incentives to do that kind of broader reasoning without a patient having to show up with a print‑out from Gemini, but until then these tools are becoming the second opinion patients can actually obtain.

ratelimitsteve 9mo ago

what was the second diagnosis?

tootie 9mo ago

I can give you the exact opposite anecdote for myself. Spent weeks with Dr Google and one or another LLMs (few years ago so not current SOTA) describing myself and getting like 10 wrong possibilities. Took my best guess with me to a doctor who listened to me babble for 5 minutes and immediately gave me a correct diagnosis of a condition I had not remotely considered. Problem was most likely that I was not accurately describing my symptoms because it was difficult to put it into words. But also I was probably priming queries with my own expected (and mistaken) outcomes. Not sure if current models would have done a better job, but in my case at least, a human doctor was far superior.

tsoukase 9mo ago

A cause that needs surgery is readily diagnosed with a Brain MRI. If the doctor didn't order one after symptoms of "balance and slurred speech" then it's not a success of AI but a lethal negligence of the doctor. AI is a substitute for bad doctors not (yet) for good ones.

HDThoreaun 9mo ago
The problem is that it is very difficult if not impossible for patients to know if they have a good doctor or a bad one.
- tsoukase 9mo ago
  Then may be ask ChatGPT about the quality of a specific doctor first. There might exist reviews somewhere. It would be the most valuable information.

vanishingbee 9mo ago

What I see are people returning to the same categorical errors in medicine. Drawing medical conditions from an urn occasionally yields a true diagnostic, even more so if conditions are weighed in the urn according to their prevalence in society. But disease lottery is no medical practice. Two essential errors exist in medicine: 1. Delivering a wrong intervention. 2. Failing to deliver an intervention at the right time due to misdiagnosis. These are the sins of harm and distraction. The metric for judging a system is not whether it gets things right on one occasion, but whether it makes those mistakes on the others. Doctors err because people and institutions are imperfect, biology is messy, and human variability is immense. But the former can be attenuated by a plurality of opinions and greater resources (including time), while statistical systems are inherently vulnerable to the latter two. Language models hallucinate and deliver both essential errors - all while speaking in a very confident and convincing manner. What OpenAI is advertising is a system that nudges vulnerable people to abandon, distrust, ignore, or simply avoid seeking true medical practitioners to rely on a statistical system out of an unjustified, naive trust in the machine. As a reminder to those concerned with healthcare accessibility, picking the wrong solution to a problem for lack of a right one does not solve the problem. That reasoning was the basis of practices such as bloodletting and lobotomy. Time after time again, medical science teaches us the limits of this kind of thinking.