6 ms·

That might be doctors new nightmare: people who second guess everything with AI. Previously it was "google your symptoms".

weatherlite 4mo ago
Nightmare because they're always right and the A.I second guessing is always wrong, or because they just don't like to be second guessed?
- vimda 4mo ago
  Nightmare because users approach LLMs with the false confidence that they're always right, and present LLM outputs as fact to Doctors who have to waste time explaining that it's wrong most of the time. It hurts more than it helps.
  - weatherlite 4mo ago
    > It hurts more than it helps Hurts who ? Yes the doctor is super stressed and has maybe 10 minutes for you that's the actual problem, it's not like before LLMs they were super glad to sit there and answer all your questions.
- drw85 4mo ago
  Nightmare because the AI is just generating a random text that fits the question.
  - betaby 4mo ago
    I feel the same when visiting a doctor in Canada. In that 2 minutes I have with they in one appointment per year I hear a standard text.
  - poszlem 4mo ago
    This is a very peculiar use of the word "random".
  - Legend2440 4mo ago
    This is not a fair assessment of what AI is doing. Studies have found that newer reasoning AIs are about as good at diagnosing illness from a written description of symptoms as doctors are. Granted, it cannot actually examine a patient, so we're not replacing doctors anytime soon. But your view is obsolete. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4433 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4433
    - Retric 4mo ago
      They are using the “gold standard for the evaluation of expert medical computing systems” not a proxy for what a doctor actually does when diagnosing someone. It may have some utility after diagnosis, but this test doesn’t demonstrate utility for patients.
    - snackerblues 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - microgpt 4mo ago
        But I, SCP-426, am a toaster.
  - d1sxeyes 4mo ago
    Not quite. An LLM generates text that would likely follow. The sky is… “blue”. A patient in pain with a bone protruding from their shin has a… “broken leg”. The more training data, the more questions it can answer with a reasonable degree of probability of accuracy. Throwing away a potentially useful analysis just because it’s probabilistic seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
    - drw85 4mo ago
      But for obvious cases like this, you don't need a second or first opinion. This case is about handing a 3D imaging result to a text predictor and hoping for a valid second opinion.
      - d1sxeyes 4mo ago
        Yes that’s my point. An LLM can clearly accurately predict obvious cases, so it’s reasonable to assume that it can predict less obvious cases with somewhat less accuracy. The real question is where’s the cut-off point between accuracy and utility. Remember: a second human opinion can also be wrong, and even a wrong opinion can still be useful (especially in medicine where differential diagnoses are a common practice - if the LLM gives you a useless opinion, you rule it out and move on). I don’t think it’s particularly unreasonable to think that an LLM would have enough literature, or enough reasoning ability, to be able to generate a plausible interpretation of the data. A human can then review and say either “yeah that’s clearly not the case here” or “hmm, actually that could explain it, maybe we should order another test”.
- mixologic 4mo ago
  Its a nightmare because it erodes trust. Doctors are not "always right" which is why "always get a second opinion" is codified in culture. But AI's problem is that its completely full of shit, sometimes, and the people most qualified to evaluate whether its full of shit are the doctors, not the patients, but just like OP's original article, patients are left feeling like their second opinion from AI might be more trustworthy than their doctors opinion.
  - simianwords 4mo ago
    The notion that only doctors can verify is false! Doctors are better at verification but normal people can also verify. This is just empirically true. Examples of things normal people can verify - procedural errors that Claude can capture like some blatantly high dosage (grams instead of milligrams) - outdated treatment plan, maybe there’s a credible new treatment plan that’s been used for years but the doctors were not updated - literally being injected homeopathic drugs (takes no smart person to flag this) Let’s stop talking as if doctors have a divine right here. And let’s accept some agency.
    - drw85 4mo ago
      But those are obvious errors. What if the AI tells you to up your intake of X and it seems plausible? So you up your intake of X by taking some supplement, but upping the intake of X makes your body deplete more of Y and now you have a new or compounding problem. A doctor might have never recommended upping X, because they would know what it does to your body. Or they might have suggested additional supplementation to avoid this. The fact that LLMs are trained on all public knowledge is a huge red flag, because there are more wrong infos out there than right ones. Especially about health, diet, etc.
      - simianwords 4mo ago
        I was about to respond but your last statement implies fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work. I don’t think you even know about RLHF and you think good and bad ideas are spread in proportion to how much they are seen on the internet.
- tuvix 4mo ago
  There’s more than two options here. It was already difficult to deal with self diagnosis for doctors, now we have a machine that outputs recommendations, and does it with confidence whether it’s correct or not. The same issues that were present with search-engine self diagnosis are still present with LLMs. If you provide Google with an incomplete list of symptoms and can’t interpret the information you find correctly, you will likely get an incorrect diagnosis. The same is true for LLM output.
  - rvnx 4mo ago
    There are quite a few disclaimers everywhere that soften confidence: "always ask a medical specialist", "I'm not a doctor", "this could have been this or that but really not sure", etc.
    - neonstatic 4mo ago
      No one cares about this, especially those who believe the machine. It's just there for the provider to avoid responsibility.
  - dheera 4mo ago
    Everyone on the internet loves to put doctors on a pedestal, but I think upwards of 30% of my doctor visits have been misdiagnosed. There's a reason I ask AI about absolutely everything medical and there's a reason I keep extra quantities of prescription medications around for emergencies. I've saved my own ass a lot more times than the doctors have, thanks to good doctors not being available.
    - ricardobayes 4mo ago
      That works in your case because you likely already have an analytical mindset, can reliably discard or research information further. Same thing why AI is in an enabler for people having already some skill. But it can be very dangerous or misleading for people blindly believing all output.
  - weatherlite 4mo ago
- b800h 4mo ago
  Well it was a nightmare for my mother's do-nothing GP surgery in the UK. She had several conditions which were being handled completely separately without central coordination, and her health was in serious decline. We went in with a list of 20 AI-generated questions based on her conditions and treatment (which I was able to screen as I have a bio postgrad, but not medical training), including those related to NICE guidelines and procedure, and, frankly the GP bricked it and ordered a load of new interventions. My mother started to get proper treatment. I wouldn't trust AI to make a diagnosis, but I would absolutely trust it to notice where procedure hasn't been correctly followed, where a treatment is counter-indicated because someone has missed a line on a health record, or where there's a clear potential alternate diagnosis which has been missed for spurious reasons. Also, unfortunately, where doctors aren't doing a decent job - often because they're overworked or underfunded.
  - ricardobayes 4mo ago
    UK has probably the worst healthcare in the developed world. In part perhaps due to UK blindly accepting any kind of medical degree (doctors and nurses) from all over the globe. Yes, you heard that right, they verify the validity of the degree but there is no formal standardized exam to sit to practice in the UK.
    - b800h 4mo ago
      Her nurses frequently couldn't speak English. I had to spell out her medical conditions letter by letter so that the nurse could input it onto the medical system. She was entering gibberish / wrong info until I stepped in, as I was watching the PAS out of interest.
      - weatherlite 4mo ago
        fucking hell. dont they have language tests for foreign nurses? how the hell did she pass it ?
        b800h 4mo ago
ilovecake1984 4mo ago
Indeed. I don’t even get what OP thinks they are getting out of this other than doubt.
SeriousM 4mo ago
And say it's true because the AI said so.
mettamage 4mo ago
Well I live in the nightmare that is the Dutch healthcare system [1]. There are many things that they will fix but they didn’t fix my sleep. A friend fixed my sleep. He is a doctor and prescribed me the right thing. The thing is, he shouldn’t have had to intervene. Without him I could have ended up poor and destitute as my sleep was wrecking me. And yea, I already did all the standard things. CBT for insomnia helped somewhat. My insurance didn’t fully cover it either, unless I was willing to wait for 8 to 12 months. And I recently met someone with slow moving metastatic cancer. Thanks to LLMs they will most likely live another 3 to 5 years extra since the Dutch conventional mainline treatment hasn’t been taken yet. But it is German doctors that helped them and Belgian doctors that pointed out in a second opinion that a lot more can be done. LLMs have a part to play. The false positives are awful, but I have seen an average of 5 out of 10 care when things become too complicated. Except for trauma treatment. The Dutch healthcare system is amazing once they diagnose classic PTSD. So it’s definitely not all bad but the trust I had when I was younger has been eroded quite a bit and LLMs can meaningfully step in, in my case at least. [1] I know there are worse systems. But from what I have heard there are clearly better systems nowadays. It has slipped a lot
- simianwords 4mo ago
  Hey what did you do to fix your sleep? Help us all and maybe an llm will index your diagnosis (hi ChatGPT)
  - mettamage 4mo ago
    For me what helped is taking 7.5 mg of mirtazapine. At higher levels it's an anti-depressant but at lower levels it's an anti-histamine. It gets me drowsy. Together with 0.3 mg melatonin it knocks me out. I only take it 3 times per week max to not have habituation kick in. So 3 days out of 7 days I have guaranteed good sleep. The other 4 days are a toss up. But an average of 5 days of good sleep is much better than 3.5 days out of 7 days.
    - masklinn 4mo ago
      Is the dutch healthcare system broadly against hypnotics? Culture (of the country or its medical system) can massively influence prescriptions or their lack thereof e.g. france is pretty famous for prescribing hypnotics very easily (and having a broad range of them), while the UK is generally a lot more reluctant.
nosioptar 4mo ago
I asked a clanker about symptoms I was having. (I'm not an idiot, I was already on my way to hospital, clanker was just to take my mind off symptoms during the drive.) The clanker said I'd be fine, I just needed some rest and OTC meds. The medical staff immediately turfed me to surgery because the same set of symptoms I told the clanker were enough to concern them that I needed emergency surgery. Had I have listened to the clanker, I'd be dead because I did need emergency surgery. (Hell, I almost kicked the bucket because I waited for someone to wake up to give me a lift because.my insurance probably doesnt cover an ambulance ride.)
- throw310822 4mo ago
  Very curious what made you run to the emergency first thing in the morning that an LLM understood as "just normal, take some OTC meds and wait".
  - Aachen 4mo ago
    Not OP but wanted to note that you're also likely to get different results based on the language you use (it'll respond differently to dialects of English, for example) and the RNG seed of the current session. These things are still probability engines and even if you know the exact symptoms, this might not be reproducible
consp 4mo ago
It can be helpful in your understanding the choices made by asking questions and thus in reassurance, but it requires something most people lack: understanding you are likely wrong since you are just collecting information without understanding it. Pretty much the like most manager these days, so I understand the frustration of the GPs.
gruntled-worker 4mo ago
This is obviously going to happen. But sub-par and sloppy doctors are a thing too. Medicine has been using semi-intelligent systems for years that were nevertheless found to improve outcomes. We need studies that quantify error rates from each source type, then we need to account for the fact that the artificial type will keep improving.
js2 4mo ago
The NYT did this profile a while back: "Ben Riley was already writing about the risks of chatbots when his dad started trusting A.I. over his doctor." The dad was a retired neuroscientist who delayed cancer treatment against medical advice because he was certain he had been misdiagnosed based on his own research that he did with the help of A.I. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/well/ai-chatbots-cancer.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tlA.K9ix.No5oPuTUtWu2&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/well/ai-chatbots-cancer.h... There's a comment on the article from Ben Riley: > I am very grateful to Teddy Rosenbluth for sharing my father's story with the world, her kindness and curiousity proved to be restorative in ways I didn't anticipate. > The two words that everyone used to describe my dad: "intelligent" and "kind," and he was indeed both of those things. The sad irony here is that it was his human intelligence, combined with these strange new tools that purport to be a form of 'artificial' intelligence, that led to his ill-advised decision to forego the treatment he needed for his CLL. A doctor has already commented on this story with the observation that AI "confidently asserts erroneous conclusions," and we simply have no idea how often this is happening or the magnitude of the harm that results. > Not a day goes by that I don't feel the pang of my father's absence. He might still be here if not for AI. I try not to think about that, but sometimes I can't help myself.
- ieie3366 4mo ago
  GPT-4o, which is what that article is most likely about, was an older low param count slop model which was known for abusing emojis and sycophancy. It does not really have any relevance to latest claude frontier models. Your comment is akin to saying "Karen from facebook who is a human pushed essential oils and ivermectin as a cure to cancer. Now doctor Y is suggesting chemo. Both are humans, humans cannot be trusted!"
- rvnx 4mo ago
  The context is very important: decades of a poorly-diagnosed chronic illness had left him deeply distrustful of the medical system. This is the real root issue. At 75 years old, he was stubborn. Is that reasonable ? Yes, perfectly. Could he have been right since the beginning ? Certainly. Did he deny evidence ? Yes. Zero doubt that he was intelligent, everything points toward that direction, but that doesn't make a person less stubborn, because accepting the evidence, is also accepting that you were wrong if you initially postured yourself as adversarial instead of cooperative. He would have read Wikipedia, scientific papers, etc, even without AI. He did not want to be convinced. It works both ways: https://www.foxnews.com/health/woman-says-chatgpt-saved-her-life-helping-detect-cancer-which-doctors-missed https://www.foxnews.com/health/woman-says-chatgpt-saved-her-... or https://www.today.com/health/mom-chatgpt-diagnosis-pain-rcna101843 https://www.today.com/health/mom-chatgpt-diagnosis-pain-rcna... Nonetheless, someone very smart, just didn't want to move from his position.
rvnx 4mo ago
No, this flow is actually very good. Like any domain, when you have questions or need a solution, you make research first, then you ask a specialist. If you explain well the symptoms and context you can have proper advices and then decide on the path next: Case A) It looks benign and advices / information that you collected seem reasonable, then you go your way. Case B) You need second opinion of a specialist because the subject is too complex, or there are medications that you need approval. Once you have challenged LLMs, and read about the topics over and over then you genuinely become really good at understanding it (especially if you triangulate over LLMs and ask them to challenge, you start to have genuine questions). No matter if the answer is right or wrong, you have elements. Maybe you missed the point, but you come prepared. At home you have the time to assess the options, pros and cons of each approaches, the possible questions to ask and then challenge the doctor. Shared decision-making is an actual evidence-based model of care, and patients who arrive understanding their condition and carrying specific questions tend to get better attention and better outcomes. Some doctors get annoyed, because they have big ego and choose to be patronizing, but it is exactly their job to answer such questions. With LLMs, it's quite good, you get nuanced and rather useful answers. Before LLMs, no matter the topic you searched for, the answer was the same: "you have cancer / an [obviously deadly] rare disease" The other problem, in many places: • The doctors are not affordable • They are too busy for you (< 15 minutes) • You may need to wait months to get an appointment • They are not good (country-side is an example, and sometimes even country-level) + you can have all of these factors together. So, you have something deeply bothering you, your only appointment is in 4 months. It would be insane not to take the time to explore different solutions and not to come informed about the topic. If you express your prompt properly and do not rely on imagery, you can absolutely have top-tier advices.
- neonstatic 4mo ago
  Agreed. This gets worse in cultures in which Doctors have no habit or haven't been trained that educating the patient is part of the job. Whenever I am back to my birth country, I specifically avoid doctors that are older than mid 30s, because they all have the same, terrible bed manner. They might be good at diagnosing and treating, but they never, ever explain anything, even when asked. Some even have "helpful pamphlets" to hand to the patient - anything to avoid explaining. It seems that in their view their job is not helping the patient, but completing a task - running a scan, performing a procedure, administering medicine etc. The human, that is subject of the task, is invisible.
bilsbie 4mo ago
It’s funny every profession deals with customers making their own guesses at diagnosis. I told my mechanic the film flam is broken but he said it was the rim ram. He fixed it and we all went in with our lives. But doctors insist on this God like status so it’s a “nightmare” when patients try to help themselves.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- nicman23 4mo ago
  you are literally taking sleeping pills ..
- __MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
  I dunno man, it's one thing to have your car still be broken because you were wrong, it's a different thing poison yourself on the basis of having done your own research. The mechanic can laugh at you, it hits a doctor differently.
gib444 4mo ago
It's so much worse than some Google results: people see LLMs as a trusted friend who never talks back and never questions you, who is excellent at convincingly communicating their bs, reeling you in with "tell me more so I can really lock this down", continuing to fool you A con artist, a fraud
raincole 4mo ago
People should've googled their symptoms and especially the prescriptions they got. It has always been a good practice. If[0] AI proves to be the new google then people should ask AI too. [0]: IF.
- sarchertech 4mo ago
  Do you know how many life threatening illnesses I’ve diagnosed myself with by googling symptoms?
w10-1 4mo ago
It's not just the second-guessing. It's the getting in the ballpark but striking out: explaining in detail why they are not correct. A little bit of patient knowledge requires a tremendous amount of doctor time to explain away the ignorance. It's a 180 for me: While I believe doctors should explain diagnosis or treatment decisions when asked, I don't believe they should be taxed with explaining away alternatives. In my anecdotal 2nd- and 3rd-hand experience, doing that is taking at least a third of their time (on roughly 5% of the patients who think demanding answers will make things better) -- with zero improvement to diagnostic accuracy or treatment effectiveness. Doctors already consult with other doctors, and it makes no sense for them to have to consult with ignorant patients or treat their AI psychosis on top of their disease. It doesn't increase patient autonomy any more than adding a steering wheel for child car seats would help toddlers learn to drive.
- mindslight 4mo ago
  Explaining diagnosis and treatment recommendations decisions inherently involves explaining away the alternatives. In this world where patients are ultimately responsible for our own care, explaining your rationale is a straightforward part of the job - otherwise there is nothing for patients to base their decisions on apart from how the options make them feel. If visits haven't been allotted enough time to get the job done, then that is something you need to take up with health plan bureaucrats rather than taking it out on patients.

weatherlite 4mo ago

Nightmare because they're always right and the A.I second guessing is always wrong, or because they just don't like to be second guessed?

vimda 4mo ago
Nightmare because users approach LLMs with the false confidence that they're always right, and present LLM outputs as fact to Doctors who have to waste time explaining that it's wrong most of the time. It hurts more than it helps.
- weatherlite 4mo ago
  > It hurts more than it helps Hurts who ? Yes the doctor is super stressed and has maybe 10 minutes for you that's the actual problem, it's not like before LLMs they were super glad to sit there and answer all your questions.
drw85 4mo ago
Nightmare because the AI is just generating a random text that fits the question.
- betaby 4mo ago
  I feel the same when visiting a doctor in Canada. In that 2 minutes I have with they in one appointment per year I hear a standard text.
- poszlem 4mo ago
  This is a very peculiar use of the word "random".
- Legend2440 4mo ago
  This is not a fair assessment of what AI is doing. Studies have found that newer reasoning AIs are about as good at diagnosing illness from a written description of symptoms as doctors are. Granted, it cannot actually examine a patient, so we're not replacing doctors anytime soon. But your view is obsolete. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4433 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4433
  - Retric 4mo ago
    They are using the “gold standard for the evaluation of expert medical computing systems” not a proxy for what a doctor actually does when diagnosing someone. It may have some utility after diagnosis, but this test doesn’t demonstrate utility for patients.
  - snackerblues 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - microgpt 4mo ago
      But I, SCP-426, am a toaster.
- d1sxeyes 4mo ago
  Not quite. An LLM generates text that would likely follow. The sky is… “blue”. A patient in pain with a bone protruding from their shin has a… “broken leg”. The more training data, the more questions it can answer with a reasonable degree of probability of accuracy. Throwing away a potentially useful analysis just because it’s probabilistic seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
  - drw85 4mo ago
    But for obvious cases like this, you don't need a second or first opinion. This case is about handing a 3D imaging result to a text predictor and hoping for a valid second opinion.
    - d1sxeyes 4mo ago
      Yes that’s my point. An LLM can clearly accurately predict obvious cases, so it’s reasonable to assume that it can predict less obvious cases with somewhat less accuracy. The real question is where’s the cut-off point between accuracy and utility. Remember: a second human opinion can also be wrong, and even a wrong opinion can still be useful (especially in medicine where differential diagnoses are a common practice - if the LLM gives you a useless opinion, you rule it out and move on). I don’t think it’s particularly unreasonable to think that an LLM would have enough literature, or enough reasoning ability, to be able to generate a plausible interpretation of the data. A human can then review and say either “yeah that’s clearly not the case here” or “hmm, actually that could explain it, maybe we should order another test”.
mixologic 4mo ago
Its a nightmare because it erodes trust. Doctors are not "always right" which is why "always get a second opinion" is codified in culture. But AI's problem is that its completely full of shit, sometimes, and the people most qualified to evaluate whether its full of shit are the doctors, not the patients, but just like OP's original article, patients are left feeling like their second opinion from AI might be more trustworthy than their doctors opinion.
- simianwords 4mo ago
  The notion that only doctors can verify is false! Doctors are better at verification but normal people can also verify. This is just empirically true. Examples of things normal people can verify - procedural errors that Claude can capture like some blatantly high dosage (grams instead of milligrams) - outdated treatment plan, maybe there’s a credible new treatment plan that’s been used for years but the doctors were not updated - literally being injected homeopathic drugs (takes no smart person to flag this) Let’s stop talking as if doctors have a divine right here. And let’s accept some agency.
  - drw85 4mo ago
    But those are obvious errors. What if the AI tells you to up your intake of X and it seems plausible? So you up your intake of X by taking some supplement, but upping the intake of X makes your body deplete more of Y and now you have a new or compounding problem. A doctor might have never recommended upping X, because they would know what it does to your body. Or they might have suggested additional supplementation to avoid this. The fact that LLMs are trained on all public knowledge is a huge red flag, because there are more wrong infos out there than right ones. Especially about health, diet, etc.
    - simianwords 4mo ago
      I was about to respond but your last statement implies fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work. I don’t think you even know about RLHF and you think good and bad ideas are spread in proportion to how much they are seen on the internet.
tuvix 4mo ago
There’s more than two options here. It was already difficult to deal with self diagnosis for doctors, now we have a machine that outputs recommendations, and does it with confidence whether it’s correct or not. The same issues that were present with search-engine self diagnosis are still present with LLMs. If you provide Google with an incomplete list of symptoms and can’t interpret the information you find correctly, you will likely get an incorrect diagnosis. The same is true for LLM output.
- rvnx 4mo ago
  There are quite a few disclaimers everywhere that soften confidence: "always ask a medical specialist", "I'm not a doctor", "this could have been this or that but really not sure", etc.
  - neonstatic 4mo ago
    No one cares about this, especially those who believe the machine. It's just there for the provider to avoid responsibility.
- dheera 4mo ago
  Everyone on the internet loves to put doctors on a pedestal, but I think upwards of 30% of my doctor visits have been misdiagnosed. There's a reason I ask AI about absolutely everything medical and there's a reason I keep extra quantities of prescription medications around for emergencies. I've saved my own ass a lot more times than the doctors have, thanks to good doctors not being available.
  - ricardobayes 4mo ago
    That works in your case because you likely already have an analytical mindset, can reliably discard or research information further. Same thing why AI is in an enabler for people having already some skill. But it can be very dangerous or misleading for people blindly believing all output.
- weatherlite 4mo ago
b800h 4mo ago
Well it was a nightmare for my mother's do-nothing GP surgery in the UK. She had several conditions which were being handled completely separately without central coordination, and her health was in serious decline. We went in with a list of 20 AI-generated questions based on her conditions and treatment (which I was able to screen as I have a bio postgrad, but not medical training), including those related to NICE guidelines and procedure, and, frankly the GP bricked it and ordered a load of new interventions. My mother started to get proper treatment. I wouldn't trust AI to make a diagnosis, but I would absolutely trust it to notice where procedure hasn't been correctly followed, where a treatment is counter-indicated because someone has missed a line on a health record, or where there's a clear potential alternate diagnosis which has been missed for spurious reasons. Also, unfortunately, where doctors aren't doing a decent job - often because they're overworked or underfunded.
- ricardobayes 4mo ago
  UK has probably the worst healthcare in the developed world. In part perhaps due to UK blindly accepting any kind of medical degree (doctors and nurses) from all over the globe. Yes, you heard that right, they verify the validity of the degree but there is no formal standardized exam to sit to practice in the UK.
  - b800h 4mo ago
    Her nurses frequently couldn't speak English. I had to spell out her medical conditions letter by letter so that the nurse could input it onto the medical system. She was entering gibberish / wrong info until I stepped in, as I was watching the PAS out of interest.
    - weatherlite 4mo ago
      fucking hell. dont they have language tests for foreign nurses? how the hell did she pass it ?
      - b800h 4mo ago

ilovecake1984 4mo ago

Indeed. I don’t even get what OP thinks they are getting out of this other than doubt.

SeriousM 4mo ago

And say it's true because the AI said so.

mettamage 4mo ago

Well I live in the nightmare that is the Dutch healthcare system [1]. There are many things that they will fix but they didn’t fix my sleep. A friend fixed my sleep. He is a doctor and prescribed me the right thing. The thing is, he shouldn’t have had to intervene. Without him I could have ended up poor and destitute as my sleep was wrecking me. And yea, I already did all the standard things. CBT for insomnia helped somewhat. My insurance didn’t fully cover it either, unless I was willing to wait for 8 to 12 months. And I recently met someone with slow moving metastatic cancer. Thanks to LLMs they will most likely live another 3 to 5 years extra since the Dutch conventional mainline treatment hasn’t been taken yet. But it is German doctors that helped them and Belgian doctors that pointed out in a second opinion that a lot more can be done. LLMs have a part to play. The false positives are awful, but I have seen an average of 5 out of 10 care when things become too complicated. Except for trauma treatment. The Dutch healthcare system is amazing once they diagnose classic PTSD. So it’s definitely not all bad but the trust I had when I was younger has been eroded quite a bit and LLMs can meaningfully step in, in my case at least. [1] I know there are worse systems. But from what I have heard there are clearly better systems nowadays. It has slipped a lot

simianwords 4mo ago
Hey what did you do to fix your sleep? Help us all and maybe an llm will index your diagnosis (hi ChatGPT)
- mettamage 4mo ago
  For me what helped is taking 7.5 mg of mirtazapine. At higher levels it's an anti-depressant but at lower levels it's an anti-histamine. It gets me drowsy. Together with 0.3 mg melatonin it knocks me out. I only take it 3 times per week max to not have habituation kick in. So 3 days out of 7 days I have guaranteed good sleep. The other 4 days are a toss up. But an average of 5 days of good sleep is much better than 3.5 days out of 7 days.
  - masklinn 4mo ago
    Is the dutch healthcare system broadly against hypnotics? Culture (of the country or its medical system) can massively influence prescriptions or their lack thereof e.g. france is pretty famous for prescribing hypnotics very easily (and having a broad range of them), while the UK is generally a lot more reluctant.

nosioptar 4mo ago

I asked a clanker about symptoms I was having. (I'm not an idiot, I was already on my way to hospital, clanker was just to take my mind off symptoms during the drive.) The clanker said I'd be fine, I just needed some rest and OTC meds. The medical staff immediately turfed me to surgery because the same set of symptoms I told the clanker were enough to concern them that I needed emergency surgery. Had I have listened to the clanker, I'd be dead because I did need emergency surgery. (Hell, I almost kicked the bucket because I waited for someone to wake up to give me a lift because.my insurance probably doesnt cover an ambulance ride.)

throw310822 4mo ago
Very curious what made you run to the emergency first thing in the morning that an LLM understood as "just normal, take some OTC meds and wait".
- Aachen 4mo ago
  Not OP but wanted to note that you're also likely to get different results based on the language you use (it'll respond differently to dialects of English, for example) and the RNG seed of the current session. These things are still probability engines and even if you know the exact symptoms, this might not be reproducible

consp 4mo ago

It can be helpful in your understanding the choices made by asking questions and thus in reassurance, but it requires something most people lack: understanding you are likely wrong since you are just collecting information without understanding it. Pretty much the like most manager these days, so I understand the frustration of the GPs.

gruntled-worker 4mo ago

This is obviously going to happen. But sub-par and sloppy doctors are a thing too. Medicine has been using semi-intelligent systems for years that were nevertheless found to improve outcomes. We need studies that quantify error rates from each source type, then we need to account for the fact that the artificial type will keep improving.

js2 4mo ago

The NYT did this profile a while back: "Ben Riley was already writing about the risks of chatbots when his dad started trusting A.I. over his doctor." The dad was a retired neuroscientist who delayed cancer treatment against medical advice because he was certain he had been misdiagnosed based on his own research that he did with the help of A.I. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/well/ai-chatbots-cancer.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tlA.K9ix.No5oPuTUtWu2&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/well/ai-chatbots-cancer.h... There's a comment on the article from Ben Riley: > I am very grateful to Teddy Rosenbluth for sharing my father's story with the world, her kindness and curiousity proved to be restorative in ways I didn't anticipate. > The two words that everyone used to describe my dad: "intelligent" and "kind," and he was indeed both of those things. The sad irony here is that it was his human intelligence, combined with these strange new tools that purport to be a form of 'artificial' intelligence, that led to his ill-advised decision to forego the treatment he needed for his CLL. A doctor has already commented on this story with the observation that AI "confidently asserts erroneous conclusions," and we simply have no idea how often this is happening or the magnitude of the harm that results. > Not a day goes by that I don't feel the pang of my father's absence. He might still be here if not for AI. I try not to think about that, but sometimes I can't help myself.

ieie3366 4mo ago
GPT-4o, which is what that article is most likely about, was an older low param count slop model which was known for abusing emojis and sycophancy. It does not really have any relevance to latest claude frontier models. Your comment is akin to saying "Karen from facebook who is a human pushed essential oils and ivermectin as a cure to cancer. Now doctor Y is suggesting chemo. Both are humans, humans cannot be trusted!"
rvnx 4mo ago
The context is very important: decades of a poorly-diagnosed chronic illness had left him deeply distrustful of the medical system. This is the real root issue. At 75 years old, he was stubborn. Is that reasonable ? Yes, perfectly. Could he have been right since the beginning ? Certainly. Did he deny evidence ? Yes. Zero doubt that he was intelligent, everything points toward that direction, but that doesn't make a person less stubborn, because accepting the evidence, is also accepting that you were wrong if you initially postured yourself as adversarial instead of cooperative. He would have read Wikipedia, scientific papers, etc, even without AI. He did not want to be convinced. It works both ways: https://www.foxnews.com/health/woman-says-chatgpt-saved-her-life-helping-detect-cancer-which-doctors-missed https://www.foxnews.com/health/woman-says-chatgpt-saved-her-... or https://www.today.com/health/mom-chatgpt-diagnosis-pain-rcna101843 https://www.today.com/health/mom-chatgpt-diagnosis-pain-rcna... Nonetheless, someone very smart, just didn't want to move from his position.

rvnx 4mo ago

No, this flow is actually very good. Like any domain, when you have questions or need a solution, you make research first, then you ask a specialist. If you explain well the symptoms and context you can have proper advices and then decide on the path next: Case A) It looks benign and advices / information that you collected seem reasonable, then you go your way. Case B) You need second opinion of a specialist because the subject is too complex, or there are medications that you need approval. Once you have challenged LLMs, and read about the topics over and over then you genuinely become really good at understanding it (especially if you triangulate over LLMs and ask them to challenge, you start to have genuine questions). No matter if the answer is right or wrong, you have elements. Maybe you missed the point, but you come prepared. At home you have the time to assess the options, pros and cons of each approaches, the possible questions to ask and then challenge the doctor. Shared decision-making is an actual evidence-based model of care, and patients who arrive understanding their condition and carrying specific questions tend to get better attention and better outcomes. Some doctors get annoyed, because they have big ego and choose to be patronizing, but it is exactly their job to answer such questions. With LLMs, it's quite good, you get nuanced and rather useful answers. Before LLMs, no matter the topic you searched for, the answer was the same: "you have cancer / an [obviously deadly] rare disease" The other problem, in many places: • The doctors are not affordable • They are too busy for you (< 15 minutes) • You may need to wait months to get an appointment • They are not good (country-side is an example, and sometimes even country-level) + you can have all of these factors together. So, you have something deeply bothering you, your only appointment is in 4 months. It would be insane not to take the time to explore different solutions and not to come informed about the topic. If you express your prompt properly and do not rely on imagery, you can absolutely have top-tier advices.

neonstatic 4mo ago
Agreed. This gets worse in cultures in which Doctors have no habit or haven't been trained that educating the patient is part of the job. Whenever I am back to my birth country, I specifically avoid doctors that are older than mid 30s, because they all have the same, terrible bed manner. They might be good at diagnosing and treating, but they never, ever explain anything, even when asked. Some even have "helpful pamphlets" to hand to the patient - anything to avoid explaining. It seems that in their view their job is not helping the patient, but completing a task - running a scan, performing a procedure, administering medicine etc. The human, that is subject of the task, is invisible.

bilsbie 4mo ago

It’s funny every profession deals with customers making their own guesses at diagnosis. I told my mechanic the film flam is broken but he said it was the rim ram. He fixed it and we all went in with our lives. But doctors insist on this God like status so it’s a “nightmare” when patients try to help themselves.

deleted 4mo ago
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nicman23 4mo ago
you are literally taking sleeping pills ..
__MatrixMan__ 4mo ago
I dunno man, it's one thing to have your car still be broken because you were wrong, it's a different thing poison yourself on the basis of having done your own research. The mechanic can laugh at you, it hits a doctor differently.

gib444 4mo ago

It's so much worse than some Google results: people see LLMs as a trusted friend who never talks back and never questions you, who is excellent at convincingly communicating their bs, reeling you in with "tell me more so I can really lock this down", continuing to fool you A con artist, a fraud

raincole 4mo ago

People should've googled their symptoms and especially the prescriptions they got. It has always been a good practice. If[0] AI proves to be the new google then people should ask AI too. [0]: IF.

sarchertech 4mo ago
Do you know how many life threatening illnesses I’ve diagnosed myself with by googling symptoms?

w10-1 4mo ago

It's not just the second-guessing. It's the getting in the ballpark but striking out: explaining in detail why they are not correct. A little bit of patient knowledge requires a tremendous amount of doctor time to explain away the ignorance. It's a 180 for me: While I believe doctors should explain diagnosis or treatment decisions when asked, I don't believe they should be taxed with explaining away alternatives. In my anecdotal 2nd- and 3rd-hand experience, doing that is taking at least a third of their time (on roughly 5% of the patients who think demanding answers will make things better) -- with zero improvement to diagnostic accuracy or treatment effectiveness. Doctors already consult with other doctors, and it makes no sense for them to have to consult with ignorant patients or treat their AI psychosis on top of their disease. It doesn't increase patient autonomy any more than adding a steering wheel for child car seats would help toddlers learn to drive.

mindslight 4mo ago
Explaining diagnosis and treatment recommendations decisions inherently involves explaining away the alternatives. In this world where patients are ultimately responsible for our own care, explaining your rationale is a straightforward part of the job - otherwise there is nothing for patients to base their decisions on apart from how the options make them feel. If visits haven't been allotted enough time to get the job done, then that is something you need to take up with health plan bureaucrats rather than taking it out on patients.