Live data from Hacker News

I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

inflecthealth.medium.com

161–170 of 253 posts

Re: I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

#161

I'm having a hard time buying this anecdote. Not even the bit where its implied that multiple people read the same script multiple times and that worked for soothing people, but the actual content of the before and after; the gpt version doesn't explain it any differently and the 'compassionate' writing was absurd. My most charitable interpretation is that the anecdote is true but the article itself was written by so…

> Side note; does anyone actually think that chat gpt succeeds at rewriting things 'compassionately' or 'more intelligently'?

Yes, I use it for this purpose all the time. I could have done better myself if I invested time in writing it, but it allows me to get a good enough result in a couple of seconds.

Re: I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

#162
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The teleprompter bit makes no sense. Do you feel less confident in your doctor after learning that any kind of serious treatment usually involves a checklist ? Following a script isn't a sign of lacking skills - it's a sign of being wise enough to recognize human limitations. Medical care isn't improv comedy.

Looking at notes or a paper is one thing and checklists and timeouts serve an important role in safety, but being unable to hold a conversation about a fundamental concept without a script is quite another, and it is lacking a skill by definition.

Really depends on the situation. I have no doubts a typical doctor could easily ELI5[0] you anything about the procedures or treatments they're administering - once well fed, well rested, and somewhat relaxed. But if you're catching them as they're overworked and asking them to context-switch on the spot, well... I'd expect it work just as well as it would with software engineers. That is, if I was subject to random ELI5 requests during a busy work period, you'd bet I'd start preparing notes up front (and probably put them on a Wiki, and then give the people asking me a link to that wiki, and politely tell them to RTFM and GTFO).

--

[0] - "Explain Like I'm 5 [years old]". It's Reddit-speak, but describes the concept quite well, and there isn't a proper single word alternative for it.

Re: I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

#163
I don't know if it's fake, but I would not bet on it. There is imho a large crisis of trust in all types of institutions, professions etc. Being a doctor has been demystified to an extent, for various reasons (e.g. the realization I've heard from some people that doctors didn't really know what was wrong and they just went from one guess to another, large amount of information being available giving people the wrong impression they know more than they do etc. etc.). It's also my personal explanation for the rise in alternative medicine, homeopathy, ivermectin treatments for covid, but also more broadly various forms of conspiracy theories. It's not far fetched that some people would trust "AI" more than a doctor who they don't trust or respect at all anymore.

So fake or not, it definitely hits a nerve as something that is possible. On a tangent, I think this is actually quite interesting. If I was a sociologist, I would be interested in the root cause of this as much as a scientist or an engineer is interested in a bridge falling down. But I mostly see lamenting that the world has gone crazy.

Re: I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

#164

This really feels farcical, and kind of like vc bros hyping up a product. Considering this was a serious issue of life and death of a patient, it was surprising how it read like a prank or like the scene from Harold and Kumar, where Kumar plays a fake doctor and saves an ER patient through sheer luck. I know some doctors are full of baloney but c'mon. I really hope maybe that we create better doctors that have a lot…

Problem is with high empathy is that it affects you too. That might be pretty exhausting in a stressful hospital environment.

Re: I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

#165
post #106

This really feels farcical, and kind of like vc bros hyping up a product. Considering this was a serious issue of life and death of a patient, it was surprising how it read like a prank or like the scene from Harold and Kumar, where Kumar plays a fake doctor and saves an ER patient through sheer luck. I know some doctors are full of baloney but c'mon. I really hope maybe that we create better doctors that have a lot…

Fake or not, people are incorporating ChatGPT into their work. We had a pipeline break today and when we looked at the PR that introduced the change it was in the PR notes that the tooling configuration was derived from a ChatGPT prompt. What do you even say or do about that?

Did ChatGPT also perform the code review?

Re: I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

#166
post #155
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then if you don't want your messages to read like that, you'll use bots to condense and extract the bits you care about.

And thus we will have invented a lossy rarefaction scheme for communication? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rarefaction

We already do that during normal communication - people rarely say what they mean in the simplest way possible. We couch the message in all kinds of extraneous details. The tediousness of which is part of why some people want to use LLMs to generate messages for them in the first place.

Stripping that out might ironically reduce the need: Of people come to expect their messages to be automatically stripped of fluff, why include it in the first place?

Re: I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

#167
>> I printed this response up, and read it to the concerned family. As I recited ChatGPT’s words, their agitated expressions immediately melted into calm agreeability.

not bad for a corny $0.5 hardback novel - but wtf was that about? If a Doctor read that script about my mother in ER, I'd be more insulated than had they printed the source code of a Linux Kernel module and proceeded to read it out in full, verbatim!

So what one's a Doctor or another's a Lawyer and even involved in tech VC world? Artificial Intelligence is extremely complex and specialized field, plenty of learned professionals and VCs have been mesmerized then duped by "altruistic" tech projects in the filed of AI or Crypto.

In the 80 and 90s automation tech in call centers was supposed to revolutionize customer support blah blah blah ... didn't work, people hate automation/robotic behavior, so the Industry switched to outsourcing calls to human operators in countries with cheaper salaries - it worked - and that drove other outsourcing innovations. I fear, chat bots and generative AI will fair the same - they're barking at the wrong tree.

Re: I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

#168
post #150

This really feels farcical, and kind of like vc bros hyping up a product. Considering this was a serious issue of life and death of a patient, it was surprising how it read like a prank or like the scene from Harold and Kumar, where Kumar plays a fake doctor and saves an ER patient through sheer luck. I know some doctors are full of baloney but c'mon. I really hope maybe that we create better doctors that have a lot…

Actual ER doctors disagree with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36336615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36337227 Classic HN to confidently dismiss something in areas we're actually clueless about.

Like Web3 smart contracts which will experience a resurgence in 2024?

Re: I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

#169

This really feels farcical, and kind of like vc bros hyping up a product. Considering this was a serious issue of life and death of a patient, it was surprising how it read like a prank or like the scene from Harold and Kumar, where Kumar plays a fake doctor and saves an ER patient through sheer luck. I know some doctors are full of baloney but c'mon. I really hope maybe that we create better doctors that have a lot…

The concept is right on point though: ChatGPT is excellent at writing "fluffy" pieces full of empathy, compassion, PR talk, politician speech, and any other wordy flavor you need. As an engineer who is unable to produce such writing, this tool is quite helpful!

Apparently that’s what you need to secure funding for your startups: https://www.zdnet.com/article/gpt-4-generated-pitches-are-3x...

Re: I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many comments are saying it's helpful. But what happens when it's widespread, everyone crafting Hallmark type empathic messages to everyone. Or once everyone has bots, then most likely they will all be sent straight to spam or something. We will be inundated with such messaging.

I look forward to AI-generated sappy Hallmark-like messages, because they're bound to be better written than the same types of messages most humans write today. The sentiment will be no less fake. It'll just be better written.

Exactly. And if you want that for comments on your forum, we’ve built a prototype here

https://app.engageusers.ai

Post reply on HN