4 ms·

A year or so ago, I fed my wife's blood work results into chatgpt and it came back with a terrifying diagnosis. Even after a lot of back and forth it stuck to i

A year or so ago, I fed my wife's blood work results into chatgpt and it came back with a terrifying diagnosis. Even after a lot of back and forth it stuck to its guns. We went to a specialist who performed some additional tests and explained that the condition cannot be diagnosed with just the original blood work and said that she did not have the condition. The whole thing was a borderline traumatic ordeal that I'm still pretty pissed about.

daveguy 8mo ago
Please keep telling your story. This is the kind of shit that medical science has been dealing with for at least a century. When evaluating testing procedures false positives can have serious consequences. A test that's positive every time will catch every single true positive, but it's also worthless. These LLMs don't have a goddamn clue about it. There should be consequences for these garbage fires giving medical advice.
- maerF0x0 8mo ago
  Part of the issue is taking it's output as conclusion rather than as a signal / lead. I would never let an LLM make an amputate or not decision, but it could convince me to go talk with an expert who sees me in person and takes a holistic view.
irjustin 8mo ago
Isn't it two sides to the same coin? You should be happy about it that it's not the thing specifically when the signs pointed towards it being "the thing"?
- themafia 8mo ago
  You are _absolutely_ going to die in the next 30 minutes. When it doesn't happen will you still be happy?
  - irjustin 8mo ago
    How is this apples-apples at all? But to answer directly... yes? yes, I am. [edit] A bit it more real. My blood pressure monitor says my bp is 200/160. Chat says you're dead get yourself to a hospital. Get to the hospital and says oh your bp monitor is wrong. I'm happy? I would say that I am. Sure I'm annoyed at my machine, but way happier it's wrong than right.
    - vineyardmike 8mo ago
      This is another example of why its frustrating still. "Yes I'm happy I'm not dying" ignores that "go to the hospital [and waste a day, maybe some financial cost]" because a machine was wrong. This is still pretty inconvenient because a machine wasn't accurate/calibrated/engineered weak. Not dying is good, but the emotions and fear for a period of time is still bad.
      - irjustin 8mo ago
        Yeah I guess I just don't see eye-to-eye on this. I 100% understand those frustrations. That the "detectors" should've been more accurate, or the fears, battery of tests, and costs associated of time and money. But, if you have the means to find out something that could have been extremely concerning is actually "nothing wrong" - isn't that worth it? My friend is 45, had bloody stool -> colonoscopy -> polyps removed -> benign. Isn't that way better than colon cancer? Maybe it's a glass half-empty-full thing.
  - nprateem 8mo ago
    Depends if I'm now broke from blowing it all on crack and hookers.
SchemaLoad 8mo ago
I asked a doctor friend why it seems common for healthcare workers to keep the results sheets to themself and just give you a good/bad summary. He told me that the average person can't properly understand the data and will freak themselves out over nothing.
- smt88 8mo ago
  I'm in the US and have never experienced anyone keeping results to themselves. In fact, I can now easily access even my doctor's appointment notes. I have my entire chart unless my doctor specifically writes private notes.
fn-mote 8mo ago
> I fed my wife's blood work results into chatgpt and it came back with a terrifying diagnosis I don't get it... a doctor ordered the blood work, right? And surely they did not have this opinion or you would have been sent to a specialist right away. In this case, the GP who ordered the blood work was the gatekeeper. Shouldn't they have been the person to deal with this inquiry in the first place? I would be a lot more negative about "the medical establishment" if they had been the ones who put you through the trauma. It sounds like this story is putting yourself through trauma by believing "Dr. GPT" instead of consulting a real doctor. I will take it as a cautionary tale, and remember it next time I feed all of my test results into an LLM.
- vineyardmike 8mo ago
  You don't need a doctor to order bloodwork. I get a full panel done yearly, just to establish a baseline and trend. I try not to overanalyze it, and just keep it around for a professional in case some real issue arises in the future.
  - jbverschoor 8mo ago
    In some countries you do. The Netherlands for example
- kolinko 8mo ago
  At least in Poland, I can almost always see my results before my doctor does - I get a notification that the labwork is ready and I can view results online. Also, the regular bloodwork is around $50-$100 (for noninsured or without a prescription), so many people just do this out of pocket once in a while and only bring to doctor if anything looks suspicious. Finally, there is EU regulation about data that applies to medical field as well - you always have the right to view all the data that any company has stored about you. Gatekeeping is forbidden by law.
orionsbelt 8mo ago
> "A year or so ago" What model? Care to share the conversation? Or try again and see how the latest model does?
themafia 8mo ago
> it stuck to its guns It gave you a probabilistic output. There were no guns and nothing to stick to. If you had disrupted the context with enough countervailing opinion it would have "relented" simply because the conversational probabilities changed.
- nprateem 8mo ago
  It's amazing this still needs to be said, especially here
  - coffeefirst 8mo ago
    Here, sure. For the general public, these tools have been advertised this way. So if a good subset of HN still gets fooled, the layperson is screwed.
    - gizajob 8mo ago
      Hmm or the layperson wouldn’t be “smart” enough to think that ChatGPT could give useful answers to complex health questions.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- tstrimple 8mo ago
  I was amused but not impressed when I was able to convince Claude Code that it was useless and absolutely not a service worth paying for. It literally apologized and recommended I ask for a refund. I mean, I still get lots of value from CC. Just that it's easy to push them into whatever corner you want.
greenknight 8mo ago
On the flip side, i had some pain in my chest... RUQ (right upper quadrant for those medical folk). On the way to the hospital, ChatGPT was pretty confident it was a issue with my gallbladder due to me having a fatty meal for lunch (but it was delicious). After an extended wait time to be seen, they didnt ask about anything like that, and at the end they were like anything else to add, added it in about ChatGPT / Gallbladder... discharged 5 minutes later with suspicion of Gallbladder as they couldnt do anything that night. Over the next few weeks, got test after test after test, to try and figure out whats going on. MRI. CT. Ultrasound etc.etc. they all came back negative for the gallbladder. ChatGPT was persistant. It said to get a HIDA scan, a more specialised scan. My GP was a bit reluctant but agreed. Got it, and was diagnosed with a hyperkinetic gallbladder. It is still unrecognised as an issue, but mostly accepted. So much so my surgeon initally said that it wasnt a thing (then after doing research about it, says it is a thing)... and a gastroentologist also said it wasnt a thing. Had it taken out a few weeks ago, and it was chroically inflammed. Which means the removal was the correct path to go down. It just sucks that your wife was on the other end of things.
- tharkun__ 8mo ago
  This reminds me of another recent comment in some other post, about doctors not diagnosing "hard to diagnose" things. There are probably ("good") reasons for this. But your own persistence, and today the help of AI, can potentially help you. The problem with it is the same problem as previously: "charlatans". Just that today the charlatan and the savior are both one and the same: The AI. I do recognize that most people probably can't tell one from the other. In both cases ;) You'll find this in my post history a few times now but essentially: I was lethargic all the time, got migraine type headaches "randomly" a lot. Having the feeling I'd need to puke. One time I had to stop driving as it just got so bad. I suddenly was no longer able to tolerate alcohol either. I went to multiple doctors, was sent to specialists, who all told me that they could maaaaaybe do test XYX but essentially: It wasn't a thing, I was crazy. Through a lot of online research I "figured out" (and that's an over-statement) that it was something about the gut microbiome. Something to do with histamine. I tried a bunch of things, like I suspected it might be DAO (Di-Amino-Oxidase) insufficiency. I tried a bunch of probiotics, both the "heals all your stuff" and "you need to take a single strain or it won't work" type stuff. Including "just take Actimel". Actimel gave me headaches! Turns out one of the (prominent) strains in there makes histamine. Guess what, Alcohol, especially some, has histamines and your "hangover" is also essentially histamines (made worse by the dehydration). And guess what else, some foods, especially some I love, contain or break down into histamines. So I figured that somehow it's all about histamines and how my current gut microbiome does not deal well with excess histamines (through whichever source). None of the doctors I went to believed this to be a "thing" nor did they want to do anything about it. Then I found a pro-biotic that actually helped. If you really want to check what I am taking, check the history. I'm not a marketing machine. What I do believe is that one particular bacterium helped, because it's the one thing that wasn't in any of the other ones I took: Bacillus subtilis. A soil based bacterium, which in the olden times, you'd have gotten from slightly not well enough cleaned cabbage or whatever vegetable du jour you were eating. Essentially: if your toddler stuffs his face with a handful of dirt, that's one thing they'd be getting and it's for the better! I'm saying this, because the rest of the formulation was essentially the same as the others I tried. I took three pills per day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I felt like shit for two weeks, even getting headaches again. I stuck with it. After about two weeks I started feeling better. I think that's when my gut microbiome got "turned around". I was no longer lethargic and I could eat blue cheese and lasagna three days in a row with two glasses of red wine and not get a headache any longer! Those are all foods that contain or make lots of histamine. I still take one per day and I have no more issues. But you gotta get to this, somehow, through all of the bullshit people that try to sell you their "miracle cure" stuff. And it's just as hard as trying to suss out where the AI is bullshitting you. There was exactly a single doctor in my life, who I would consider good in that regard. I had already figured the above one out by that time but I was doing keto and it got all of my blood markers, except for cholesterol into normal again. She literally "googled" with me about keto a few times, did a blood test to confirm that I was in ketosis and in general was just awesome about this. She was notoriously difficult to book and later than any doctor for schedules appointments, but she took her time and even that would not really ever have been enough to suss out the stuff that I figured out through research myself if you ask me. While doctors are the "half gods in white", I think there's just way too much stuff and way too little time for them. It's like: All the bugs at your place of work. Now imagine you had exactly one doctor across a multitude of companies. Of course they only figure out the "common" ones ...
terribleperson 8mo ago
Do you have a custom prompt/personality set? What is it?
- ltbarcly3 8mo ago
  Yea, if only he had said "make sure you are always honest" first!
  - terribleperson 8mo ago
    It's not that you need to ask it to be honest, it's that the defaults are kind of stupid and obnoxiously sycophantic. ChatGPT is also prone to getting stuck on particular ideas. If you're using the vanilla personalities without a custom prompt, not aware of and working against its issues, and not starting new chats occasionally you won't get good results. You'll get good-sounding garbage. Part of my custom prompt is ```When using factual information beyond what I provide, verify it when possible. When researching factual questions—especially by relying on papers and studies—actively look for null findings, negative results, and contradictory evidence, not just positive or confirmatory findings.``` To me, the most interesting result of that part of my prompt is that in thinking mode, it ends up re-checking it's assumptions and sources fairly often. It's not about honesty, but correctness. A custom prompt isn't the be-all end-all either. The right kind of questioning is important, and you also need to get a fresh context when you ask new questions or if you want to double check something.
fouc 8mo ago
> it stuck to its guns Everyone that encounters this needs to do a clean/fresh prompt with memory disabled to really know if the LLM is going to consistently come to the same conclusion or not.
jesterson 8mo ago
Never ceases to surpise me why people taking word salad output so seriously. And probably the same people laugh at ancient folks carefully listening to shamans.
bigbuppo 8mo ago
Why not just ask WebMD?
worldsavior 8mo ago
I think it's your problem you got stressed from a probabilistic machine answering with what you want to hear.
lugu 8mo ago
I am sorry I have to say so, but the value of LLM is their ability to reason based on their context. Don't use them as smart wikipedia (without context). To your use case, provide them with different textbook and practice handbook and with the medical history of the person. Then ask your question in a neutral way. Then ask it to verify their claim in another session and provide references. It is so unfortunate that a general chatbot designed to answer anything was the first use case pushed. I get it when people are pissed.
gizajob 8mo ago
You’re pissed about your own stupidity? In asking for deep knowledge and medical advice from a Markov chain?
eleveriven 8mo ago
Stories like yours are why I'm skeptical of these "health insight" products as currently shipped. Visualization, explanation, question-generation - great. Acting like an interpreter of incomplete medical data without a strong refusal mode is genuinely dangerous
filoeleven 8mo ago
Gotta love the replies to this. At least more of the botheads are now acting like they're trying to ask helpful questions instead of just flat out saying "you're using it wrong."
josefresco 8mo ago
I fed about 4ish years of blood tests into an AI and after some back and forth it identified a possible issue that might signal recovery. I sheepishly brought it up with my doc, who actually said it might be worth looking into. Nothing earth shattering, just another opinion.
mrguyorama 8mo ago
>The whole thing was a borderline traumatic ordeal that I'm still pretty pissed about. Why did you do the thing people calmly explained you should not do? Why are you pissed about experiencing the obvious and known outcome? In medicine, even a test with "Worrying" results is rarely an actual condition requiring treatment. One reason doctors are so bad at long tail conditions is that they have been trained, both by education and literal direct experience, that chasing down test results without any symptoms is a reliable way to waste money, time, and emotions. It's a classic statistics 101 topic to look at screening tests and notice that the majority of "positive" outcomes are false positives.
ltbarcly3 8mo ago
It's interesting because presumably you were too ashamed to tell the doctor "we pasted stuff into chatgpt and it said it means she is sick", because if you had said that he would have looked at the bloodwork and you could have avoided going to a specialist. It's an interesting cognitive dissonance that you both trusted it enough to go to a specialist but not enough to admit using it.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
pengaru 8mo ago
> A year or so ago, I fed my wife's blood work results into chatgpt Why would you consult a known bullshit generator for anything this important?
port11 8mo ago
You used a predictive/statistical proximity chatbot on a single point-in-time snapshot of her blood, and you’re pissed that the result wasn’t useful? I think any decent GP would push back, want to see trends in the data, or at least look at the broader context. I mean, at some point we have to admit that LLMs aren’t designed for correctness but utility.

daveguy 8mo ago

Please keep telling your story. This is the kind of shit that medical science has been dealing with for at least a century. When evaluating testing procedures false positives can have serious consequences. A test that's positive every time will catch every single true positive, but it's also worthless. These LLMs don't have a goddamn clue about it. There should be consequences for these garbage fires giving medical advice.

maerF0x0 8mo ago
Part of the issue is taking it's output as conclusion rather than as a signal / lead. I would never let an LLM make an amputate or not decision, but it could convince me to go talk with an expert who sees me in person and takes a holistic view.

irjustin 8mo ago

Isn't it two sides to the same coin? You should be happy about it that it's not the thing specifically when the signs pointed towards it being "the thing"?

themafia 8mo ago
You are _absolutely_ going to die in the next 30 minutes. When it doesn't happen will you still be happy?
- irjustin 8mo ago
  How is this apples-apples at all? But to answer directly... yes? yes, I am. [edit] A bit it more real. My blood pressure monitor says my bp is 200/160. Chat says you're dead get yourself to a hospital. Get to the hospital and says oh your bp monitor is wrong. I'm happy? I would say that I am. Sure I'm annoyed at my machine, but way happier it's wrong than right.
  - vineyardmike 8mo ago
    This is another example of why its frustrating still. "Yes I'm happy I'm not dying" ignores that "go to the hospital [and waste a day, maybe some financial cost]" because a machine was wrong. This is still pretty inconvenient because a machine wasn't accurate/calibrated/engineered weak. Not dying is good, but the emotions and fear for a period of time is still bad.
    - irjustin 8mo ago
      Yeah I guess I just don't see eye-to-eye on this. I 100% understand those frustrations. That the "detectors" should've been more accurate, or the fears, battery of tests, and costs associated of time and money. But, if you have the means to find out something that could have been extremely concerning is actually "nothing wrong" - isn't that worth it? My friend is 45, had bloody stool -> colonoscopy -> polyps removed -> benign. Isn't that way better than colon cancer? Maybe it's a glass half-empty-full thing.
- nprateem 8mo ago
  Depends if I'm now broke from blowing it all on crack and hookers.

SchemaLoad 8mo ago

I asked a doctor friend why it seems common for healthcare workers to keep the results sheets to themself and just give you a good/bad summary. He told me that the average person can't properly understand the data and will freak themselves out over nothing.

smt88 8mo ago
I'm in the US and have never experienced anyone keeping results to themselves. In fact, I can now easily access even my doctor's appointment notes. I have my entire chart unless my doctor specifically writes private notes.

fn-mote 8mo ago

> I fed my wife's blood work results into chatgpt and it came back with a terrifying diagnosis I don't get it... a doctor ordered the blood work, right? And surely they did not have this opinion or you would have been sent to a specialist right away. In this case, the GP who ordered the blood work was the gatekeeper. Shouldn't they have been the person to deal with this inquiry in the first place? I would be a lot more negative about "the medical establishment" if they had been the ones who put you through the trauma. It sounds like this story is putting yourself through trauma by believing "Dr. GPT" instead of consulting a real doctor. I will take it as a cautionary tale, and remember it next time I feed all of my test results into an LLM.

vineyardmike 8mo ago
You don't need a doctor to order bloodwork. I get a full panel done yearly, just to establish a baseline and trend. I try not to overanalyze it, and just keep it around for a professional in case some real issue arises in the future.
- jbverschoor 8mo ago
  In some countries you do. The Netherlands for example
kolinko 8mo ago
At least in Poland, I can almost always see my results before my doctor does - I get a notification that the labwork is ready and I can view results online. Also, the regular bloodwork is around $50-$100 (for noninsured or without a prescription), so many people just do this out of pocket once in a while and only bring to doctor if anything looks suspicious. Finally, there is EU regulation about data that applies to medical field as well - you always have the right to view all the data that any company has stored about you. Gatekeeping is forbidden by law.

orionsbelt 8mo ago

> "A year or so ago" What model? Care to share the conversation? Or try again and see how the latest model does?

themafia 8mo ago

> it stuck to its guns It gave you a probabilistic output. There were no guns and nothing to stick to. If you had disrupted the context with enough countervailing opinion it would have "relented" simply because the conversational probabilities changed.

nprateem 8mo ago
It's amazing this still needs to be said, especially here
- coffeefirst 8mo ago
  Here, sure. For the general public, these tools have been advertised this way. So if a good subset of HN still gets fooled, the layperson is screwed.
  - gizajob 8mo ago
    Hmm or the layperson wouldn’t be “smart” enough to think that ChatGPT could give useful answers to complex health questions.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
tstrimple 8mo ago
I was amused but not impressed when I was able to convince Claude Code that it was useless and absolutely not a service worth paying for. It literally apologized and recommended I ask for a refund. I mean, I still get lots of value from CC. Just that it's easy to push them into whatever corner you want.

greenknight 8mo ago

On the flip side, i had some pain in my chest... RUQ (right upper quadrant for those medical folk). On the way to the hospital, ChatGPT was pretty confident it was a issue with my gallbladder due to me having a fatty meal for lunch (but it was delicious). After an extended wait time to be seen, they didnt ask about anything like that, and at the end they were like anything else to add, added it in about ChatGPT / Gallbladder... discharged 5 minutes later with suspicion of Gallbladder as they couldnt do anything that night. Over the next few weeks, got test after test after test, to try and figure out whats going on. MRI. CT. Ultrasound etc.etc. they all came back negative for the gallbladder. ChatGPT was persistant. It said to get a HIDA scan, a more specialised scan. My GP was a bit reluctant but agreed. Got it, and was diagnosed with a hyperkinetic gallbladder. It is still unrecognised as an issue, but mostly accepted. So much so my surgeon initally said that it wasnt a thing (then after doing research about it, says it is a thing)... and a gastroentologist also said it wasnt a thing. Had it taken out a few weeks ago, and it was chroically inflammed. Which means the removal was the correct path to go down. It just sucks that your wife was on the other end of things.

tharkun__ 8mo ago
This reminds me of another recent comment in some other post, about doctors not diagnosing "hard to diagnose" things. There are probably ("good") reasons for this. But your own persistence, and today the help of AI, can potentially help you. The problem with it is the same problem as previously: "charlatans". Just that today the charlatan and the savior are both one and the same: The AI. I do recognize that most people probably can't tell one from the other. In both cases ;) You'll find this in my post history a few times now but essentially: I was lethargic all the time, got migraine type headaches "randomly" a lot. Having the feeling I'd need to puke. One time I had to stop driving as it just got so bad. I suddenly was no longer able to tolerate alcohol either. I went to multiple doctors, was sent to specialists, who all told me that they could maaaaaybe do test XYX but essentially: It wasn't a thing, I was crazy. Through a lot of online research I "figured out" (and that's an over-statement) that it was something about the gut microbiome. Something to do with histamine. I tried a bunch of things, like I suspected it might be DAO (Di-Amino-Oxidase) insufficiency. I tried a bunch of probiotics, both the "heals all your stuff" and "you need to take a single strain or it won't work" type stuff. Including "just take Actimel". Actimel gave me headaches! Turns out one of the (prominent) strains in there makes histamine. Guess what, Alcohol, especially some, has histamines and your "hangover" is also essentially histamines (made worse by the dehydration). And guess what else, some foods, especially some I love, contain or break down into histamines. So I figured that somehow it's all about histamines and how my current gut microbiome does not deal well with excess histamines (through whichever source). None of the doctors I went to believed this to be a "thing" nor did they want to do anything about it. Then I found a pro-biotic that actually helped. If you really want to check what I am taking, check the history. I'm not a marketing machine. What I do believe is that one particular bacterium helped, because it's the one thing that wasn't in any of the other ones I took: Bacillus subtilis. A soil based bacterium, which in the olden times, you'd have gotten from slightly not well enough cleaned cabbage or whatever vegetable du jour you were eating. Essentially: if your toddler stuffs his face with a handful of dirt, that's one thing they'd be getting and it's for the better! I'm saying this, because the rest of the formulation was essentially the same as the others I tried. I took three pills per day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I felt like shit for two weeks, even getting headaches again. I stuck with it. After about two weeks I started feeling better. I think that's when my gut microbiome got "turned around". I was no longer lethargic and I could eat blue cheese and lasagna three days in a row with two glasses of red wine and not get a headache any longer! Those are all foods that contain or make lots of histamine. I still take one per day and I have no more issues. But you gotta get to this, somehow, through all of the bullshit people that try to sell you their "miracle cure" stuff. And it's just as hard as trying to suss out where the AI is bullshitting you. There was exactly a single doctor in my life, who I would consider good in that regard. I had already figured the above one out by that time but I was doing keto and it got all of my blood markers, except for cholesterol into normal again. She literally "googled" with me about keto a few times, did a blood test to confirm that I was in ketosis and in general was just awesome about this. She was notoriously difficult to book and later than any doctor for schedules appointments, but she took her time and even that would not really ever have been enough to suss out the stuff that I figured out through research myself if you ask me. While doctors are the "half gods in white", I think there's just way too much stuff and way too little time for them. It's like: All the bugs at your place of work. Now imagine you had exactly one doctor across a multitude of companies. Of course they only figure out the "common" ones ...

terribleperson 8mo ago

Do you have a custom prompt/personality set? What is it?

ltbarcly3 8mo ago
Yea, if only he had said "make sure you are always honest" first!
- terribleperson 8mo ago
  It's not that you need to ask it to be honest, it's that the defaults are kind of stupid and obnoxiously sycophantic. ChatGPT is also prone to getting stuck on particular ideas. If you're using the vanilla personalities without a custom prompt, not aware of and working against its issues, and not starting new chats occasionally you won't get good results. You'll get good-sounding garbage. Part of my custom prompt is ```When using factual information beyond what I provide, verify it when possible. When researching factual questions—especially by relying on papers and studies—actively look for null findings, negative results, and contradictory evidence, not just positive or confirmatory findings.``` To me, the most interesting result of that part of my prompt is that in thinking mode, it ends up re-checking it's assumptions and sources fairly often. It's not about honesty, but correctness. A custom prompt isn't the be-all end-all either. The right kind of questioning is important, and you also need to get a fresh context when you ask new questions or if you want to double check something.

fouc 8mo ago

> it stuck to its guns Everyone that encounters this needs to do a clean/fresh prompt with memory disabled to really know if the LLM is going to consistently come to the same conclusion or not.

jesterson 8mo ago

Never ceases to surpise me why people taking word salad output so seriously. And probably the same people laugh at ancient folks carefully listening to shamans.

bigbuppo 8mo ago

Why not just ask WebMD?

worldsavior 8mo ago

I think it's your problem you got stressed from a probabilistic machine answering with what you want to hear.

lugu 8mo ago

I am sorry I have to say so, but the value of LLM is their ability to reason based on their context. Don't use them as smart wikipedia (without context). To your use case, provide them with different textbook and practice handbook and with the medical history of the person. Then ask your question in a neutral way. Then ask it to verify their claim in another session and provide references. It is so unfortunate that a general chatbot designed to answer anything was the first use case pushed. I get it when people are pissed.

gizajob 8mo ago

You’re pissed about your own stupidity? In asking for deep knowledge and medical advice from a Markov chain?

eleveriven 8mo ago

Stories like yours are why I'm skeptical of these "health insight" products as currently shipped. Visualization, explanation, question-generation - great. Acting like an interpreter of incomplete medical data without a strong refusal mode is genuinely dangerous

filoeleven 8mo ago

Gotta love the replies to this. At least more of the botheads are now acting like they're trying to ask helpful questions instead of just flat out saying "you're using it wrong."

josefresco 8mo ago

I fed about 4ish years of blood tests into an AI and after some back and forth it identified a possible issue that might signal recovery. I sheepishly brought it up with my doc, who actually said it might be worth looking into. Nothing earth shattering, just another opinion.

mrguyorama 8mo ago

>The whole thing was a borderline traumatic ordeal that I'm still pretty pissed about. Why did you do the thing people calmly explained you should not do? Why are you pissed about experiencing the obvious and known outcome? In medicine, even a test with "Worrying" results is rarely an actual condition requiring treatment. One reason doctors are so bad at long tail conditions is that they have been trained, both by education and literal direct experience, that chasing down test results without any symptoms is a reliable way to waste money, time, and emotions. It's a classic statistics 101 topic to look at screening tests and notice that the majority of "positive" outcomes are false positives.

ltbarcly3 8mo ago

It's interesting because presumably you were too ashamed to tell the doctor "we pasted stuff into chatgpt and it said it means she is sick", because if you had said that he would have looked at the bloodwork and you could have avoided going to a specialist. It's an interesting cognitive dissonance that you both trusted it enough to go to a specialist but not enough to admit using it.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

pengaru 8mo ago

> A year or so ago, I fed my wife's blood work results into chatgpt Why would you consult a known bullshit generator for anything this important?

port11 8mo ago

You used a predictive/statistical proximity chatbot on a single point-in-time snapshot of her blood, and you’re pissed that the result wasn’t useful? I think any decent GP would push back, want to see trends in the data, or at least look at the broader context. I mean, at some point we have to admit that LLMs aren’t designed for correctness but utility.