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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 a

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?
- moshegramovsky 9mo ago
  > This was something many many doctors originally claimed was completely safe. I never heard any doctors claim any of the covid vaccines were completely safe. Do you mind if I ask which doctors, exactly? Not institutions, not vibes, not headlines. Individual doctors. Medicine is not a hive mind, and collapsing disagreement, uncertainty, and bad messaging into “many doctors” is doing rhetorical work that the evidence has to earn. > The role of LLMs is they take the human bias out of the picture. That is simply false. LLMs are trained on human writing, human incentives, and human errors. They can weaken certain authority and social pressures, which is valuable, but they do not escape bias. They average it. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it produces very confident nonsense. > 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. > 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 are entitled to that opinion, but I wanted to kiss the surgeon who removed my daughter’s gangrenous appendix. That reaction was not to their supposed prestige, it was recognition that someone applied years of hard won skill correctly at a moment where failure had permanent consequences. Doctors make mistakes. Some are incompetent. Some are cynical. None of that justifies treating the entire profession as functionally equivalent to a trade whose failures usually cost money rather than lives. And if doctors are car mechanics, then patients are machines. That framing strips the humanity from all of us. That is nihilism. No one should trust doctors by default. Agreed. But no one should distrust them by default either. Judgment works when it is applied case by case, not when it is replaced with blanket contempt.
  - threethirtytwo 9mo ago
    > I never heard any doctors claim any of the covid vaccines were completely safe. Do you mind if I ask which doctors, exactly? Not institutions, not vibes, not headlines. Individual doctors. Medicine is not a hive mind, and collapsing disagreement, uncertainty, and bad messaging into “many doctors” is doing rhetorical work that the evidence has to earn. There’s no data here. Many aspects of life are not covered by science because trials are expensive and we have to go with vibes. And even on just vibes we often can get accurate judgements. Do you need clinical trials to confirm there’s a ground when you leap off your bed? No. Only vibes unfortunately. If you ask people (who are not doctors) to remember this time they will likely tell you this is what they remember. I also do have tons of anecdotal accounts of doctors saying the Covid 19 vaccine is safe and you can find many yourself by searching. Here’s one: https://fb.watch/Evzwfkc6Mp/?mibextid=wwXIfr https://fb.watch/Evzwfkc6Mp/?mibextid=wwXIfr The pediatrician failed to communicate the risks of the vaccine above and made the claim it was safe. At the time to my knowledge the actual risks of the vaccine were not fully known and the safety was not fully validated. The overarching intuition was that the risk of detrimental of effects from the vaccine was less than the risk+consequence of dying from Covid. That is still the underlying logic (and best official practice) today even with the knowledge about the heart risk covid vaccines pose. This doctor above did not communicate this risk at all. And this was just from a random google search. Anecdotal but the fact that I found one just from a casual search is telling. These people are not miracle workers. > That is simply false. LLMs are trained on human writing, human incentives, and human errors. They can weaken certain authority and social pressures, which is valuable, but they do not escape bias. They average it. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it produces very confident nonsense. No it’s not false. Most of the writing on human medical stuff is scientific in nature. Formalized with experimental trials which is the strongest form of truth humanity has both practically and theoretically. This “medical science” is even more accurate than other black box sciences like psychology as clinical trials have ultra high thresholds and even test for causality (in contrast to much of science only covers correlation and assumes causality through probabilistic reasoning) This combined with anecdotal evidence that the LLM digests in aggregate is a formidable force. We as humans cannot quantify all anecdotal evidence. For example, I heard anecdotal evidence of heart issues with rna vaccines BEFORE the science confirmed it and LLMs were able to aggregate this sentiment through sheer volumetric training on all complaints of the vaccine online and confirm the same thing BEFORE that Stanford confirmation was available. > You are entitled to that opinion, but I wanted to kiss the surgeon who removed my daughter’s gangrenous appendix. That reaction was not to their supposed prestige, it was recognition that someone applied years of hard won skill correctly at a moment where failure had permanent consequences. Sure I applaud that. True hero work for that surgeon. I’m talking about the profession in aggregate. In aggregate in the US 800000k patients die or get permanently injured from a misdiagnosis every year. Physicians fuck up and it’s not occasionally. It’s often and all the fucking time. You were safer getting on the 737 max the year before they diagnosed the mcas errors then you are NOT getting a misdiagnosis and dying from a doctor. Those engineers despite widespread criticism did more for your life and safety than doctors in general. That is not only a miracle of engineering but it also speaks volumes of the medical profession itself which DOES not get equivalent criticism for mistakes. That 800000k statistic is swept under the rug like car accidents. I am entitled to my own opinion just as you are to yours but I’m making a bigger claim here. My opinion is not just an opinion. It’s a ground truth general fact backed up by numbers. > And if doctors are car mechanics, then patients are machines. That framing strips the humanity from all of us. That is nihilism. There is nothing wrong with car mechanics. It’s an occupation and it’s needed. And those cars if they fail they can cause accidents that involve our very lives. But car mechanics are fallible and that fallibility is encoded into the respect they get. Of course there are individual mechanics who are great and on a case by case basis we pay those mechanics more respect. Doctors need to be treated the same way. It’s not nilhism. It’s a quantitative analysis grounded in reality. The only piece of evidence you provided me in your counter is your daughter’s life being saved. That evidence warrants respect for the single doctor who saved your daughter’s life and not for the profession in general. The numbers agree with me. And treatment for say the corporation responsible for the mcas failures and the profession responsible for medical misdiagnosis that killed people is disproportionate. Your own sentiment and respect for doctors in general is one piece of evidence for this.
g947o 9mo ago
Linking this anecdote to anti-vaxxing really seems a stretch, and I would like to see the reasoning behind that. My impression is that anti-vaxxers have more issues with vaccines themselves than with doctors who recommend them
- glenstein 9mo ago
  I think that completely misreads a comment that was already painstakingly clear, they're specifically talking about the phenomenon of reasoning by anecdote. It wasn't a one-to-one equivalence between LLM driven medicine consultations and the full range of dynamics found in the anti-vax movement. Remember to engage in charitable interpretation.
- jtbayly 9mo ago
  They are closely related. The authority of the medical establishment is more and more questioned. And whenever it is correctly questioned, they lose a bit of their authority. It is only their authority that gets people vaccinated.
- yesitcan 9mo ago
  “Asking inquisitive questions and thinking for themselves? Must be an anti-vaxxer!”
- arethuza 9mo ago
  "My impression is that anti-vaxxers have more issues" - I think you could have left it at that!
neves 9mo ago
[flagged]
ToucanLoucan 9mo ago
> How frequent are mis-diagnosis like this? The anecdote in question is not about mis-diagnosis, it's about a delayed diagnosis. And yeah, the inquiry sent a doctor down three paths, one of which led to a diagnosis, so let's be clear: no, the doctor didn't get it completely on their own, and: ChatGPT was, at best, 33% correct. The biggest problem in medicine right now (that's creating a lot of the issues people have with it I'd claim) is twofold: - Engaging with it is expensive, which raises the expectations of quality of service substantially on the part of the patients and their families - Virtually every doctor I've ever talked to complains about the same things: insufficient time to give proper care and attention to patients, and the overbearingness of insurance companies. And these two lead into each other: so much of your doc's time is spent documenting your case. Basically every hour of patient work on their part requires a second hour of charting to document it. Imagine having to write documentation for an hour for every hour of coding you did, I bet you'd be behind a lot too. Add to it how overworked and stretched every medical profession is from nursing to doctors themselves, and you have a recipe for a really shitty experience on the part of the patients, a lot of whom, like doctors, spend an inordinate amount of time fighting with insurance companies. > How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcomes? Depends on the quality of the research. In the case of this anecdote, I would say middling. I would also say though if the anecdotes of numerous medical professionals I've heard speak on the topic are to be believed, this is an outlier in regard to it actually being good. The majority of "patient research" that shows up is new parents upset about a vaccine schedule they don't understand, and half-baked conspiracy theories from Facebook. Often both at once. That said, any professional, doctors included, can benefit from more information from whomever they're serving. I have a great relationship with my mechanic because by the time I take my car to him, I've already ruled out a bunch of obvious stuff, and I arrive with detailed notes on what I've done, what I've tried, what I've replaced, and most importantly: I'm honest about it. I point exactly where my knowledge on the vehicle ends, and hope he can fill in the blanks, or at least he'll know where to start poking. The problem there is the vast majority of the time, people don't approach doctors as "professionals who know more than me who can help me solve a problem," they approach them as ideological enemies and/or gatekeepers of whatever they think they need, which isn't helpful and creates conflict. > Are there medical boards that are sending PSAs to help doctors improve common mis-diagnosis? Doctors have shitloads of journals and reading materials that are good for them to go through, which also factors into their overworked-ness but nevertheless; yes. > Whats the role of LLMs in all of this? Honestly I see a lot of applications of them in the insurance side of things, unless we wanted to do something cool and like, get a decent healthcare system going.
comboy 9mo ago
I also don't know. Additional point to consider: vast majority of doctors have no clue about Bayes theorem.
- emeril 9mo ago
  well, to the credit of Bayes, dementia is likely a safe choice (depending on age/etc.) but dementia is largely a diagnosis of exclusion and most doctors, besides being unfamiliar with Bayes, are also just plain lazy and/or dumb and shouldn't immediately jump to the most likely explanation when it's one with the worst prognosis and fewest treatments...
- biofox 9mo ago
  I work in biomed. Every textbook on epidemiology or medical statistics that I've picked up has had a section on Bayes, so I'm not inclined to believe this.
  - robrenaud 9mo ago
    Here is research about doctors interpreting test results. It seems to favor GP's view that many doctors struggle to weigh test specificity and sensitivity vs disease base rate. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/5/7/e008155.full.pdf https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/5/7/e008155.full.pdf
herpdyderp 9mo ago
The fact is that many doctors do suck. Nearly all of my family members have terrible doctor stories, one even won a huge malpractice law suit. We can’t hide the real problems because we’re afraid of anti-vaxxers.
wookmaster 9mo ago
If you keep hearing anecdotes at what point is it statistically important ? IBM 15 years ago was selling a story about a search engine they created specifically for the medical field(they had it on jeopardy) where doctors spent 10 years before they figured this poor patients issue. They plugged the original doctors notes into it and the 4th result was the issue they took a decade to figure out. Memorizing dozens of medical books and being able to recall and correlate all that information in a human brain is a rare skill to be good at. The medical system works hard to ensure everyone going through can memorize but clearly search engines/llms can be a massive help here.
- utopiah 9mo ago
  > If you keep hearing anecdotes at what point is it statistically important ? Fair question but one has to keep in mind about ALL the other situations we do NOT hear about, namely all the failed attempts that did take time from professionals. It doesn't the successful attempts are not justified, solely that a LOT of positive anecdotes might give the wrong impressions that they are not radically most negative ones that are simply not shared. It's hard to draw conclusions either way without both.
  - 542354234235 9mo ago
    I hear about people winning the lottery all the time. There were two $100m+ winners just this week. The anecdotes just keep piling up! That doesn't mean the lottery is a valid investment tool. People just do not understand how statistically insignificant anecdotes are in a sufficiently large dataset. Just for the US population, a 1 in a million chance of something happening to a person should happen enough to be reported on a new person every weekday of the year.
    - ryandrake 9mo ago
      You guys are getting downvoted but you're 100% right. You never hear the stories about someone typing symptoms into ChatGPT and getting back wrong, bullshit answers--or the exact answer their doctor would have told them. Because those stories are boring. You only hear about the miraculous cases where ChatGPT accurately diagnosed an unusual condition. What's the ratio of miracle:bullshit? 1:100? 1:10,000?
jtbayly 9mo ago
I think the ultimate answer is that people must take responsibility for their own health and that of their children and loved ones. That includes research and double-checking your doctors. True, the result is that a good number of people will be convinced they have something (eg. autism) that they don't. But the anecdotes are piled up into giant mountains at this point. A good number of people in my family have had at least one doctor that has been useless in dealing with a particular problem. It required trying to figure out what was wrong, then finding a doctor that could help before there were correct diagnoses and treatments.
- mcny 9mo ago
  But we are idiots. There's a reason why flour has iron and salt has iodine, right? Individual responsibility simply does not scale.
  - nostrademons 9mo ago
    We are idiots who will bear the consequences of our own idiocy. The big issue with all transactions done under significant information asymmetry is moral hazard. The person performing the service has far less incentive to ensure a good outcome past the conclusion of the transaction than the person who lives with the outcome. Applies doubly now that many health care interactions are transactional and you won't even see the same doctor again. On a systemic level, the likely outcome is just that people who manage their health better will survive, while people who don't will die. Evolution in action. Managing your health means paying attention when something is wrong and seeking out the right specialist to fix it, while also discarding specialists who won't help you fix it.
    - estearum 9mo ago
      > We are idiots who will bear the consequences of our own idiocy This is just factually not true. Healthy people subsidize the unhealthy (even those made unhealthy by their own idiocy) to a truly absurd degree.
      - 9mo ago
MSFT_Edging 9mo ago
Generally the medical system is in a bad place. Doctors are often frustrated with patients who demand more attention to their problems. You can even see it for yourself on doctor subreddits when things like Fibromyalgia is brought up. They ridicule these patients for trying to figure out why their quality of life has dropped like a rock. I think similar to tech, Doctors are attracted to the money, not the work. The AMA(I think, possibly another org) artificially restricts the number of slots for new doctors restricting doctor supply while private equity squeezes hospitals and buys up private practices. The failure doctors sit on the side of insurance trying to prevent care from being performed and it's up to the doctor who has the time/energy to fight insurance and the hospital to figure out what's wrong.
- nradov 9mo ago
  The AMA has no authority over the number of slots for new doctors. The primary bottleneck is the number of residency slots. Teaching hospitals are free to add more slots but generally refuse to do so due to financial constraints without more funding from Medicare. At one point the AMA lobbied Congress to restrict that funding but they reversed that position some years back. If you want more doctors then ask your members of Congress to boost residency funding. https://savegme.org/ https://savegme.org/
MetaWhirledPeas 9mo ago
> the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement I think there's a difference between questioning your doctor, and questioning advice given by almost every doctor. There are plenty of bad doctors out there, or maybe just doctors who are bad fits for their patients. They don't always listen or pay close attention to your history. And in spite of their education they don't always choose the correct diagnosis. I also think there's an ever-increasing difference between AI health research and old-school WebMD research.
diydsp 9mo ago
I can see why, but this is doc+patient in collab. And driven by using science in the form of applying llm-as-database-of-symptoms-and-treatments. Anti-vax otoh is driven by ignorance and failure to trust science in the form of neither doctors, nor new types of science. Plus, anti-vax works like flat earth; a signaling mechanism of poor epostemic judgment."
destitude 9mo ago
You must not be involved in the medical field to realize how bad it is especially when it come to diagnosis.
Gareth321 9mo ago
> I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. Too late for me. I have a similar story. ChatGPT helped me diagnose an issue which I had been suffering with my whole life. I'm a new person now. GPs don't have the time to spend hours investigating symptoms for patients. ChatGPT can provide accurate diagnoses in seconds. These tools should be in wide use today by GPs. Since they refuse, patients will take matters into their own hands. FYI, there are now studies showing ChatGPT outperforms doctors in diagnosis. (https://www.uvahealth.com/news/does-ai-improve-doctors-diagnoses-study-finds-out https://www.uvahealth.com/news/does-ai-improve-doctors-diagn...) I can believe it.
- linsomniac 9mo ago
  GPs don't have time to do the investigation, but they also have biases. My own story is one of bias. I spent much of the last 3 years with sinus infections (the part I wasn't on antibiotics). I went to a couple ENTs and one observed allergic reaction in my sinuses, did a small allergy panel, but that came back negative. He ultimately wanted to put me on a CPAP and nebulizer treatments. I fed all the data I got into ChatGPT deep research and it came back with an NIH study that said 25% of people in a study had localized allergic reactions that would show up one place, but not show up elsewhere on the body in an allergy test. I asked my ENT about it and he said "That's not how allergies work." I decided to just try second generation allergy tablets to see if they helped, since that was an easy experiment. It's been over 6 months since I've had a sinus infection, where before this I couldn't go 6 weeks after antibiotics without a reoccurrence.
  - BobaFloutist 9mo ago
    There are over a million licensed physicians in the US. If we assume that each one interacts with five patients per weekday, then in the six months since you had this experience, that would conservatively be six-hundred-million patient interactions in that time. Now, obviously none of this math would actually hold up to any scrutiny, and there's a bevy of reasons that the quality of those interactions would not be random. But just as a sense of scale, and bearing in mind that a lot of people will easily remember a single egregious interaction for the rest of their life, and (very reasonably!) be eager to share their experience with others, it would require a frankly statistically impossibly low error rate to not be able to fill threads like these with anecdotes of the most heinous, unpleasant, ignorant, and incompetent anecdotes anyone could ever imagine. And this is just looking at the sheer scale of medical care, completely ignoring the long hours and stressful situations many doctors work in, patients' imperfect memories and one-sided recollections (that doctors can never correct), and the fundamental truth that medicine is always, always a mixture of probabilistic and intuitive judgement calls that can easily, routinely be wrong, because it's almost never possible to know for sure what's happening in s given body, let alone what will happen. That E.N.T. wasn't up to date on the latest research on allergies. They also weren't an allergy specialist. They also were the one with the knowledge, skills, and insight to consider and test for allergies in the first place. Imagine if we held literally any other field to the standard we hold doctors. It's, on the one hand, fair, because they do something so important and dangerous and get compensated comparitively well. But on the other hand, they're humans with incomplete, flawed information, channeling an absurdly broad and deep well of still insufficient education that they're responsible for keeping up-to-date while looking at a unique system in unique circumstances and trying to figure out what, if anything, is going wrong. It's frankly impressive that they do as well as they do.
bethekidyouwant 9mo ago
Did you get the flu shot this year tho? Be honest.
DuperPower 9mo ago
yea specially because he is not saying what diagnosis It was, if you want to say doctors were unscientific at least be scientific and give the proper medical account of the symptoms and diagnosis
virgil_disgr4ce 9mo ago
> cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement I hear you but there are two fundamentally different things: 1. Distrust of / disbelief in science 2. Doctors not incentivized to spend more than a few minutes on any given patients There are many many anecdotes related to the second, many here in this thread. I have my own as well. I can talk to ChatGPT/whatever at any time, for any amount of time, and present in *EXHAUSTIVE* detail every single datapoint I have about my illness/problem/whatever. If I was a billionaire I assume I could pay a super-smart, highly-experienced human doctor to accommodate the same. But short of that, we have GPs who have no incentive to spend any time on you. That doesn't mean they're bad people. I'm sure the vast majority have absolutely the best of intentions. But it's simply infeasible, economically or otherwise, for them to give you the time necessary to actually solve your problem. I don't know what the solution to this is. I don't know nearly enough about the insurance and health industries to imagine what kind of structure could address this. But I am guessing that this might be what is meant by "outcome-based medicine," i.e., your job isn't done until the patient actually gets the desired outcome. Right now my GP has every incentive to say "meh" and send me home after a 3-minute visit. As a result I more or less stopped bothering making doctor appointments for certain things.
kraftman 9mo ago
I'm on some anti rejection meds post-transplant and chatgptd some of my symptoms and it said they were most likely caused by my meds. Two different nephrologists told me that the meds I'm on didn't cause those symptoms before looking it up themselves and confirming they do. I think LLMs have a place in this as far as being able to quick come up with hyphotesese that can be looked into and confirmed/disproved. If I hadn't had chatGPT, I wouldnt have brought it or my team would have just blamed lifestyle rather than meds.
nasmorn 9mo ago
Every second doctor is a below average doctor. Some are outright idiots that just became doctors because their parents expected it of them. They somehow finished med school and now they sick at their job. Have you ever interacted with doctors? In a hospital rotation where you see a different one every week. And they all tell you entirely different things with absolute confidence of a prophet after looking at your file for 2 min and talking another 3? Even good doctors have a real hard time convincing the bad doctors to do their job right. Never mind some random patient with a slightly less obvious diagnosis. This is nothing like anti vax, because it is not implying a failing of medical science. It just states that enough doctors are bad enough at their job that user research is useful. To realize you need to go to a better doctor

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?

moshegramovsky 9mo ago
> This was something many many doctors originally claimed was completely safe. I never heard any doctors claim any of the covid vaccines were completely safe. Do you mind if I ask which doctors, exactly? Not institutions, not vibes, not headlines. Individual doctors. Medicine is not a hive mind, and collapsing disagreement, uncertainty, and bad messaging into “many doctors” is doing rhetorical work that the evidence has to earn. > The role of LLMs is they take the human bias out of the picture. That is simply false. LLMs are trained on human writing, human incentives, and human errors. They can weaken certain authority and social pressures, which is valuable, but they do not escape bias. They average it. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it produces very confident nonsense. > 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. > 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 are entitled to that opinion, but I wanted to kiss the surgeon who removed my daughter’s gangrenous appendix. That reaction was not to their supposed prestige, it was recognition that someone applied years of hard won skill correctly at a moment where failure had permanent consequences. Doctors make mistakes. Some are incompetent. Some are cynical. None of that justifies treating the entire profession as functionally equivalent to a trade whose failures usually cost money rather than lives. And if doctors are car mechanics, then patients are machines. That framing strips the humanity from all of us. That is nihilism. No one should trust doctors by default. Agreed. But no one should distrust them by default either. Judgment works when it is applied case by case, not when it is replaced with blanket contempt.
- threethirtytwo 9mo ago
  > I never heard any doctors claim any of the covid vaccines were completely safe. Do you mind if I ask which doctors, exactly? Not institutions, not vibes, not headlines. Individual doctors. Medicine is not a hive mind, and collapsing disagreement, uncertainty, and bad messaging into “many doctors” is doing rhetorical work that the evidence has to earn. There’s no data here. Many aspects of life are not covered by science because trials are expensive and we have to go with vibes. And even on just vibes we often can get accurate judgements. Do you need clinical trials to confirm there’s a ground when you leap off your bed? No. Only vibes unfortunately. If you ask people (who are not doctors) to remember this time they will likely tell you this is what they remember. I also do have tons of anecdotal accounts of doctors saying the Covid 19 vaccine is safe and you can find many yourself by searching. Here’s one: https://fb.watch/Evzwfkc6Mp/?mibextid=wwXIfr https://fb.watch/Evzwfkc6Mp/?mibextid=wwXIfr The pediatrician failed to communicate the risks of the vaccine above and made the claim it was safe. At the time to my knowledge the actual risks of the vaccine were not fully known and the safety was not fully validated. The overarching intuition was that the risk of detrimental of effects from the vaccine was less than the risk+consequence of dying from Covid. That is still the underlying logic (and best official practice) today even with the knowledge about the heart risk covid vaccines pose. This doctor above did not communicate this risk at all. And this was just from a random google search. Anecdotal but the fact that I found one just from a casual search is telling. These people are not miracle workers. > That is simply false. LLMs are trained on human writing, human incentives, and human errors. They can weaken certain authority and social pressures, which is valuable, but they do not escape bias. They average it. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it produces very confident nonsense. No it’s not false. Most of the writing on human medical stuff is scientific in nature. Formalized with experimental trials which is the strongest form of truth humanity has both practically and theoretically. This “medical science” is even more accurate than other black box sciences like psychology as clinical trials have ultra high thresholds and even test for causality (in contrast to much of science only covers correlation and assumes causality through probabilistic reasoning) This combined with anecdotal evidence that the LLM digests in aggregate is a formidable force. We as humans cannot quantify all anecdotal evidence. For example, I heard anecdotal evidence of heart issues with rna vaccines BEFORE the science confirmed it and LLMs were able to aggregate this sentiment through sheer volumetric training on all complaints of the vaccine online and confirm the same thing BEFORE that Stanford confirmation was available. > You are entitled to that opinion, but I wanted to kiss the surgeon who removed my daughter’s gangrenous appendix. That reaction was not to their supposed prestige, it was recognition that someone applied years of hard won skill correctly at a moment where failure had permanent consequences. Sure I applaud that. True hero work for that surgeon. I’m talking about the profession in aggregate. In aggregate in the US 800000k patients die or get permanently injured from a misdiagnosis every year. Physicians fuck up and it’s not occasionally. It’s often and all the fucking time. You were safer getting on the 737 max the year before they diagnosed the mcas errors then you are NOT getting a misdiagnosis and dying from a doctor. Those engineers despite widespread criticism did more for your life and safety than doctors in general. That is not only a miracle of engineering but it also speaks volumes of the medical profession itself which DOES not get equivalent criticism for mistakes. That 800000k statistic is swept under the rug like car accidents. I am entitled to my own opinion just as you are to yours but I’m making a bigger claim here. My opinion is not just an opinion. It’s a ground truth general fact backed up by numbers. > And if doctors are car mechanics, then patients are machines. That framing strips the humanity from all of us. That is nihilism. There is nothing wrong with car mechanics. It’s an occupation and it’s needed. And those cars if they fail they can cause accidents that involve our very lives. But car mechanics are fallible and that fallibility is encoded into the respect they get. Of course there are individual mechanics who are great and on a case by case basis we pay those mechanics more respect. Doctors need to be treated the same way. It’s not nilhism. It’s a quantitative analysis grounded in reality. The only piece of evidence you provided me in your counter is your daughter’s life being saved. That evidence warrants respect for the single doctor who saved your daughter’s life and not for the profession in general. The numbers agree with me. And treatment for say the corporation responsible for the mcas failures and the profession responsible for medical misdiagnosis that killed people is disproportionate. Your own sentiment and respect for doctors in general is one piece of evidence for this.

g947o 9mo ago

Linking this anecdote to anti-vaxxing really seems a stretch, and I would like to see the reasoning behind that. My impression is that anti-vaxxers have more issues with vaccines themselves than with doctors who recommend them

glenstein 9mo ago
I think that completely misreads a comment that was already painstakingly clear, they're specifically talking about the phenomenon of reasoning by anecdote. It wasn't a one-to-one equivalence between LLM driven medicine consultations and the full range of dynamics found in the anti-vax movement. Remember to engage in charitable interpretation.
jtbayly 9mo ago
They are closely related. The authority of the medical establishment is more and more questioned. And whenever it is correctly questioned, they lose a bit of their authority. It is only their authority that gets people vaccinated.
yesitcan 9mo ago
“Asking inquisitive questions and thinking for themselves? Must be an anti-vaxxer!”
arethuza 9mo ago
"My impression is that anti-vaxxers have more issues" - I think you could have left it at that!

neves 9mo ago

[flagged]

ToucanLoucan 9mo ago

> How frequent are mis-diagnosis like this? The anecdote in question is not about mis-diagnosis, it's about a delayed diagnosis. And yeah, the inquiry sent a doctor down three paths, one of which led to a diagnosis, so let's be clear: no, the doctor didn't get it completely on their own, and: ChatGPT was, at best, 33% correct. The biggest problem in medicine right now (that's creating a lot of the issues people have with it I'd claim) is twofold: - Engaging with it is expensive, which raises the expectations of quality of service substantially on the part of the patients and their families - Virtually every doctor I've ever talked to complains about the same things: insufficient time to give proper care and attention to patients, and the overbearingness of insurance companies. And these two lead into each other: so much of your doc's time is spent documenting your case. Basically every hour of patient work on their part requires a second hour of charting to document it. Imagine having to write documentation for an hour for every hour of coding you did, I bet you'd be behind a lot too. Add to it how overworked and stretched every medical profession is from nursing to doctors themselves, and you have a recipe for a really shitty experience on the part of the patients, a lot of whom, like doctors, spend an inordinate amount of time fighting with insurance companies. > How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcomes? Depends on the quality of the research. In the case of this anecdote, I would say middling. I would also say though if the anecdotes of numerous medical professionals I've heard speak on the topic are to be believed, this is an outlier in regard to it actually being good. The majority of "patient research" that shows up is new parents upset about a vaccine schedule they don't understand, and half-baked conspiracy theories from Facebook. Often both at once. That said, any professional, doctors included, can benefit from more information from whomever they're serving. I have a great relationship with my mechanic because by the time I take my car to him, I've already ruled out a bunch of obvious stuff, and I arrive with detailed notes on what I've done, what I've tried, what I've replaced, and most importantly: I'm honest about it. I point exactly where my knowledge on the vehicle ends, and hope he can fill in the blanks, or at least he'll know where to start poking. The problem there is the vast majority of the time, people don't approach doctors as "professionals who know more than me who can help me solve a problem," they approach them as ideological enemies and/or gatekeepers of whatever they think they need, which isn't helpful and creates conflict. > Are there medical boards that are sending PSAs to help doctors improve common mis-diagnosis? Doctors have shitloads of journals and reading materials that are good for them to go through, which also factors into their overworked-ness but nevertheless; yes. > Whats the role of LLMs in all of this? Honestly I see a lot of applications of them in the insurance side of things, unless we wanted to do something cool and like, get a decent healthcare system going.

comboy 9mo ago

I also don't know. Additional point to consider: vast majority of doctors have no clue about Bayes theorem.

emeril 9mo ago
well, to the credit of Bayes, dementia is likely a safe choice (depending on age/etc.) but dementia is largely a diagnosis of exclusion and most doctors, besides being unfamiliar with Bayes, are also just plain lazy and/or dumb and shouldn't immediately jump to the most likely explanation when it's one with the worst prognosis and fewest treatments...
biofox 9mo ago
I work in biomed. Every textbook on epidemiology or medical statistics that I've picked up has had a section on Bayes, so I'm not inclined to believe this.
- robrenaud 9mo ago
  Here is research about doctors interpreting test results. It seems to favor GP's view that many doctors struggle to weigh test specificity and sensitivity vs disease base rate. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/5/7/e008155.full.pdf https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/5/7/e008155.full.pdf

herpdyderp 9mo ago

The fact is that many doctors do suck. Nearly all of my family members have terrible doctor stories, one even won a huge malpractice law suit. We can’t hide the real problems because we’re afraid of anti-vaxxers.

wookmaster 9mo ago

If you keep hearing anecdotes at what point is it statistically important ? IBM 15 years ago was selling a story about a search engine they created specifically for the medical field(they had it on jeopardy) where doctors spent 10 years before they figured this poor patients issue. They plugged the original doctors notes into it and the 4th result was the issue they took a decade to figure out. Memorizing dozens of medical books and being able to recall and correlate all that information in a human brain is a rare skill to be good at. The medical system works hard to ensure everyone going through can memorize but clearly search engines/llms can be a massive help here.

utopiah 9mo ago
> If you keep hearing anecdotes at what point is it statistically important ? Fair question but one has to keep in mind about ALL the other situations we do NOT hear about, namely all the failed attempts that did take time from professionals. It doesn't the successful attempts are not justified, solely that a LOT of positive anecdotes might give the wrong impressions that they are not radically most negative ones that are simply not shared. It's hard to draw conclusions either way without both.
- 542354234235 9mo ago
  I hear about people winning the lottery all the time. There were two $100m+ winners just this week. The anecdotes just keep piling up! That doesn't mean the lottery is a valid investment tool. People just do not understand how statistically insignificant anecdotes are in a sufficiently large dataset. Just for the US population, a 1 in a million chance of something happening to a person should happen enough to be reported on a new person every weekday of the year.
  - ryandrake 9mo ago
    You guys are getting downvoted but you're 100% right. You never hear the stories about someone typing symptoms into ChatGPT and getting back wrong, bullshit answers--or the exact answer their doctor would have told them. Because those stories are boring. You only hear about the miraculous cases where ChatGPT accurately diagnosed an unusual condition. What's the ratio of miracle:bullshit? 1:100? 1:10,000?

jtbayly 9mo ago

I think the ultimate answer is that people must take responsibility for their own health and that of their children and loved ones. That includes research and double-checking your doctors. True, the result is that a good number of people will be convinced they have something (eg. autism) that they don't. But the anecdotes are piled up into giant mountains at this point. A good number of people in my family have had at least one doctor that has been useless in dealing with a particular problem. It required trying to figure out what was wrong, then finding a doctor that could help before there were correct diagnoses and treatments.

mcny 9mo ago
But we are idiots. There's a reason why flour has iron and salt has iodine, right? Individual responsibility simply does not scale.
- nostrademons 9mo ago
  We are idiots who will bear the consequences of our own idiocy. The big issue with all transactions done under significant information asymmetry is moral hazard. The person performing the service has far less incentive to ensure a good outcome past the conclusion of the transaction than the person who lives with the outcome. Applies doubly now that many health care interactions are transactional and you won't even see the same doctor again. On a systemic level, the likely outcome is just that people who manage their health better will survive, while people who don't will die. Evolution in action. Managing your health means paying attention when something is wrong and seeking out the right specialist to fix it, while also discarding specialists who won't help you fix it.
  - estearum 9mo ago
    > We are idiots who will bear the consequences of our own idiocy This is just factually not true. Healthy people subsidize the unhealthy (even those made unhealthy by their own idiocy) to a truly absurd degree.
    - 9mo ago

MSFT_Edging 9mo ago

Generally the medical system is in a bad place. Doctors are often frustrated with patients who demand more attention to their problems. You can even see it for yourself on doctor subreddits when things like Fibromyalgia is brought up. They ridicule these patients for trying to figure out why their quality of life has dropped like a rock. I think similar to tech, Doctors are attracted to the money, not the work. The AMA(I think, possibly another org) artificially restricts the number of slots for new doctors restricting doctor supply while private equity squeezes hospitals and buys up private practices. The failure doctors sit on the side of insurance trying to prevent care from being performed and it's up to the doctor who has the time/energy to fight insurance and the hospital to figure out what's wrong.

nradov 9mo ago
The AMA has no authority over the number of slots for new doctors. The primary bottleneck is the number of residency slots. Teaching hospitals are free to add more slots but generally refuse to do so due to financial constraints without more funding from Medicare. At one point the AMA lobbied Congress to restrict that funding but they reversed that position some years back. If you want more doctors then ask your members of Congress to boost residency funding. https://savegme.org/ https://savegme.org/

MetaWhirledPeas 9mo ago

> the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement I think there's a difference between questioning your doctor, and questioning advice given by almost every doctor. There are plenty of bad doctors out there, or maybe just doctors who are bad fits for their patients. They don't always listen or pay close attention to your history. And in spite of their education they don't always choose the correct diagnosis. I also think there's an ever-increasing difference between AI health research and old-school WebMD research.

diydsp 9mo ago

I can see why, but this is doc+patient in collab. And driven by using science in the form of applying llm-as-database-of-symptoms-and-treatments. Anti-vax otoh is driven by ignorance and failure to trust science in the form of neither doctors, nor new types of science. Plus, anti-vax works like flat earth; a signaling mechanism of poor epostemic judgment."

destitude 9mo ago

You must not be involved in the medical field to realize how bad it is especially when it come to diagnosis.

Gareth321 9mo ago

> I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. Too late for me. I have a similar story. ChatGPT helped me diagnose an issue which I had been suffering with my whole life. I'm a new person now. GPs don't have the time to spend hours investigating symptoms for patients. ChatGPT can provide accurate diagnoses in seconds. These tools should be in wide use today by GPs. Since they refuse, patients will take matters into their own hands. FYI, there are now studies showing ChatGPT outperforms doctors in diagnosis. (https://www.uvahealth.com/news/does-ai-improve-doctors-diagnoses-study-finds-out https://www.uvahealth.com/news/does-ai-improve-doctors-diagn...) I can believe it.

linsomniac 9mo ago
GPs don't have time to do the investigation, but they also have biases. My own story is one of bias. I spent much of the last 3 years with sinus infections (the part I wasn't on antibiotics). I went to a couple ENTs and one observed allergic reaction in my sinuses, did a small allergy panel, but that came back negative. He ultimately wanted to put me on a CPAP and nebulizer treatments. I fed all the data I got into ChatGPT deep research and it came back with an NIH study that said 25% of people in a study had localized allergic reactions that would show up one place, but not show up elsewhere on the body in an allergy test. I asked my ENT about it and he said "That's not how allergies work." I decided to just try second generation allergy tablets to see if they helped, since that was an easy experiment. It's been over 6 months since I've had a sinus infection, where before this I couldn't go 6 weeks after antibiotics without a reoccurrence.
- BobaFloutist 9mo ago
  There are over a million licensed physicians in the US. If we assume that each one interacts with five patients per weekday, then in the six months since you had this experience, that would conservatively be six-hundred-million patient interactions in that time. Now, obviously none of this math would actually hold up to any scrutiny, and there's a bevy of reasons that the quality of those interactions would not be random. But just as a sense of scale, and bearing in mind that a lot of people will easily remember a single egregious interaction for the rest of their life, and (very reasonably!) be eager to share their experience with others, it would require a frankly statistically impossibly low error rate to not be able to fill threads like these with anecdotes of the most heinous, unpleasant, ignorant, and incompetent anecdotes anyone could ever imagine. And this is just looking at the sheer scale of medical care, completely ignoring the long hours and stressful situations many doctors work in, patients' imperfect memories and one-sided recollections (that doctors can never correct), and the fundamental truth that medicine is always, always a mixture of probabilistic and intuitive judgement calls that can easily, routinely be wrong, because it's almost never possible to know for sure what's happening in s given body, let alone what will happen. That E.N.T. wasn't up to date on the latest research on allergies. They also weren't an allergy specialist. They also were the one with the knowledge, skills, and insight to consider and test for allergies in the first place. Imagine if we held literally any other field to the standard we hold doctors. It's, on the one hand, fair, because they do something so important and dangerous and get compensated comparitively well. But on the other hand, they're humans with incomplete, flawed information, channeling an absurdly broad and deep well of still insufficient education that they're responsible for keeping up-to-date while looking at a unique system in unique circumstances and trying to figure out what, if anything, is going wrong. It's frankly impressive that they do as well as they do.

bethekidyouwant 9mo ago

Did you get the flu shot this year tho? Be honest.

DuperPower 9mo ago

yea specially because he is not saying what diagnosis It was, if you want to say doctors were unscientific at least be scientific and give the proper medical account of the symptoms and diagnosis

virgil_disgr4ce 9mo ago

> cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement I hear you but there are two fundamentally different things: 1. Distrust of / disbelief in science 2. Doctors not incentivized to spend more than a few minutes on any given patients There are many many anecdotes related to the second, many here in this thread. I have my own as well. I can talk to ChatGPT/whatever at any time, for any amount of time, and present in *EXHAUSTIVE* detail every single datapoint I have about my illness/problem/whatever. If I was a billionaire I assume I could pay a super-smart, highly-experienced human doctor to accommodate the same. But short of that, we have GPs who have no incentive to spend any time on you. That doesn't mean they're bad people. I'm sure the vast majority have absolutely the best of intentions. But it's simply infeasible, economically or otherwise, for them to give you the time necessary to actually solve your problem. I don't know what the solution to this is. I don't know nearly enough about the insurance and health industries to imagine what kind of structure could address this. But I am guessing that this might be what is meant by "outcome-based medicine," i.e., your job isn't done until the patient actually gets the desired outcome. Right now my GP has every incentive to say "meh" and send me home after a 3-minute visit. As a result I more or less stopped bothering making doctor appointments for certain things.

kraftman 9mo ago

I'm on some anti rejection meds post-transplant and chatgptd some of my symptoms and it said they were most likely caused by my meds. Two different nephrologists told me that the meds I'm on didn't cause those symptoms before looking it up themselves and confirming they do. I think LLMs have a place in this as far as being able to quick come up with hyphotesese that can be looked into and confirmed/disproved. If I hadn't had chatGPT, I wouldnt have brought it or my team would have just blamed lifestyle rather than meds.

nasmorn 9mo ago

Every second doctor is a below average doctor. Some are outright idiots that just became doctors because their parents expected it of them. They somehow finished med school and now they sick at their job. Have you ever interacted with doctors? In a hospital rotation where you see a different one every week. And they all tell you entirely different things with absolute confidence of a prophet after looking at your file for 2 min and talking another 3? Even good doctors have a real hard time convincing the bad doctors to do their job right. Never mind some random patient with a slightly less obvious diagnosis. This is nothing like anti vax, because it is not implying a failing of medical science. It just states that enough doctors are bad enough at their job that user research is useful. To realize you need to go to a better doctor