I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

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

I don’t understand how this is a different result than giving any LLM a task that is not completely grounded? I’ve observed this in coding tasks, if I forget to include a file referred to in the spec, the LLM will just hallucinate a version of it and my results suck. If I give it the file (and really, all the information I claimed it had access to), the task works fine. I fixed this in my pipeline with a prompt that does an extensive grounding analysis to determine if the assets I’m giving it are complete with respect to the spec (and that the spec is grounded as well, ie it doesn’t refer to something that is undefined).

I wonder if the above problem can be fixed similarly? Just ask the LLM to do a conservative grounding analysis before jumping to the main task?

They do. Ultrasound in orthopedics is a relatively newer field, and there aren't quite as many sonography techs and radiologists experienced in reading these studies, which is likely why you don't see it offered more widely.

Edit: I should mention that ultrasound is basically unusable for evaluating bones. Sound waves can't penetrate bone, and so you end up just seeing a huge black void. That's a huge orthopedics use case that ultrasound just can't benefit. However, ultrasound is fantastic for evaluating muscles, ligaments, tendons, and other superficial soft tissues.

This could be a starting point for consulting a different human expert for a second opinion (e.g., specific questions to ask about), but I wouldn't put much trust in Claude alone on this.

IME, on an almost daily basis, claude.ai and Claude Code are confidently wrong about something, and use polished language to assert nonsense.[*]

If it's doing that on something easy, like factual knowledge available in text on the Internet, or programming code that can be inspected easily and follows well-known rules, and I can tell, because I understand those things... then there's no way I'm going to assume that Claude doesn't also BS when it comes to someone else's field. Especially not a field that requires some of the smartest people to go a decade of training, just to get started in the field.

[*] And if I confront Claude with its mistakes, eventually it apologizes, and acts as if it's learned something, again mimicking word patterns it's heard real people use and mean, without meaning any of it. I wonder whether the AI user experience would be better, if LLM-ish interfaces weren't implicitly created in the image of fake-it-till-you-make-it overconfident performative sociopathic techbros.

[dead]