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I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

inflecthealth.medium.com

271–280 of 368 posts

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#271
post #229

One complaint he has is "It doesn't know to ask the right questions". Well, the prompt was to give diagnoses, not questions. Ask GPT for the follow up questions first, then the diagnoses. This is fascinating in that, because now the machine speaks human, we subconsciously ascribe human agency to it. This guy was instictively treating it like a colleague, who would naturally ask follow up questions unprompted. But you…

> Doctors are so done. I would be curious to see the outcome if the patients entered the symptom descriptions themselves...

Anonymously without fear of being judged by a human who might be required to report dangerous or illegal situations...

How many more people might be saved if they had to anonymously tell a computer the list of drugs they use regularly?

Or to use the author's example, how many ectopic pregnancies might be resolved when the patient can freely admit they were raped by a family member?

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#272
post #219

The tail end of this article, where the author talks about how many more patients he could see in his life if he had AI assistance, made me realize that part of healthcare cannot be solved by AI. The goal is not to see more patients; the goal is to help more patients get better. For a lot of patients who are frustrated and have not had their problems validated and have been to many doctors and seen no results or poor…

> The goal is not to see more patients

I previously worked on software which was sold to physicians. That the software will "let them SEE X% more patients" was the big draw. We did that by making some paper processes electronic, and in hindsight it may have been good for sales but not necessarily so for patients.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#273

One complaint he has is "It doesn't know to ask the right questions". Well, the prompt was to give diagnoses, not questions. Ask GPT for the follow up questions first, then the diagnoses. This is fascinating in that, because now the machine speaks human, we subconsciously ascribe human agency to it. This guy was instictively treating it like a colleague, who would naturally ask follow up questions unprompted. But you…

This is very likely the issue, as ChatGPT AFAIK is strongly fine-tuned to give answers right away rather than ask follow-up questions.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#274
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translators who've been picking up after machine translation for the last decade will tell you that it is not, in fact, useful to them. They get paid half as much as before, but correcting the machine output is as much work as translating from scratch, and sometimes more, since the machine can give results that look good at first glance but are fundamentally incorrect.

I don't know much about professional translating, but wouldn't you be able to track the error rate of the machine translation by looking at the number of corrections? And then translators could use this as leverage to negotiate better pay if it's obvious they need are translating from scratch in, say, 50% of cases anyway.

Pay isn't really decided by how much work you do or even completely by how much they need you to do it. What you're describing is a reason to ask for more but it's not leverage to make them give it to you.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#275
post #219

The tail end of this article, where the author talks about how many more patients he could see in his life if he had AI assistance, made me realize that part of healthcare cannot be solved by AI. The goal is not to see more patients; the goal is to help more patients get better. For a lot of patients who are frustrated and have not had their problems validated and have been to many doctors and seen no results or poor…

During my wife's second pregnancy she was admitted to hospital at 6 months due to some intense abdominal pain and inability to hold down food. The put her on PNT, pumped her stomach daily and run a bunch of tests. I logged every test. Weeks passed she was slipping away and the specialist had no real game plan. So I got another Doctor. A busy professor who travelled a lot and was clearly passionate about his field. Ye…

Your story made me tear up. You are a hero.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#276

Being a scifi geek and AI geek and neuroscience geek for pretty much the past 40 years, I've read countless predictions and scenarios and stories about society's response as "true" AI begins to emerge. So watching it play out for real is creating this bizarre sense of deja vu combined with fascination and frustration and also some anxiety. This article and the comments in this thread are right up that alley. I mean,…

The responses are bounded by two wings: those who can't see the successes and those who can't see the problems.

The author of this article seems to me to be doing a good job of navigating between them.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing the article misses is doctors are not all equal. Some are freaking terrible. Others may be competent but susceptible to bad decisions when overworked. Others are simply great. How does ChatGPT fare against the whole group? For one, it can't become "overworked", so at least better in that regard. It may well be better than a terrible doctor too. Given malpractice is consistently a leading cause of death, it…

That's a horrendous claim. > Given malpractice is consistently a leading cause of death Can you back it up?

[deleted]

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#278

One complaint he has is "It doesn't know to ask the right questions". Well, the prompt was to give diagnoses, not questions. Ask GPT for the follow up questions first, then the diagnoses. This is fascinating in that, because now the machine speaks human, we subconsciously ascribe human agency to it. This guy was instictively treating it like a colleague, who would naturally ask follow up questions unprompted. But you…

There's 0 (zero) chance I'd use a robot doctor over a (qualified, capable) human doctor. None.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The goal is not to see more patients Not when you're a doctor in the EU dealing with the shortages of socialized care where you have a limited amount of time to spend diagnosing a patient because there's dozens waiting in the queue. As a doctor you'd like to give everyone better care but you can't because you have too many people to see and too little time. Doctors here are busy AF and sometimes misdiagnose you bec…

Do you live in the EU and have experience with the healthcare system there?

YEs, that's why I'm commenting on it.

Re: I’m a doctor: Here’s what I found when I asked ChatGPT to diagnose my patients

#280
post #219

The tail end of this article, where the author talks about how many more patients he could see in his life if he had AI assistance, made me realize that part of healthcare cannot be solved by AI. The goal is not to see more patients; the goal is to help more patients get better. For a lot of patients who are frustrated and have not had their problems validated and have been to many doctors and seen no results or poor…

> The goal is not to see more patients Not when you're a doctor in the EU dealing with the shortages of socialized care where you have a limited amount of time to spend diagnosing a patient because there's dozens waiting in the queue. As a doctor you'd like to give everyone better care but you can't because you have too many people to see and too little time. Doctors here are busy AF and sometimes misdiagnose you bec…

Yes, there are queues and waiting times in our socialized healthcare here in the Netherlands. One problem is the lack of staff. Also more and more older people getting older than before. Another is the lack of funding due to the government trying to privatize as much as they can get away with (like health insurance), which loops back into the first problem.

However, my wife needed medication that was 10000 EUR per dose, which was fully covered by our socialized healthcare insurance. For most things related to health at the most I need to pay a total of 385 EUR per year out of pocket, next to the insurance premium which is about 130 a month. When those 385 EUR is gone for the year, I don't need to pay anything at all. People who can't afford the insurance premium get money from the government to cover that, and if that is not enough and you still can't pay your insurance, you are still eligible for any health care you need and a service will cover for you until you can pay again.

There are waiting lists for many things, yes, but mostly for non-urgent, non-lifethreatening things. If you need something done, it can be done. And you won't be thrown into debt to pay for it.

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