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

antoine.fi

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

#91

Post by linsomniac »

~2 years ago I used ChatGPT "deep research" to investigate a chronic sinus infection I'd been fighting for ~3 years. After seeing 3 GPs and 3 visits with an ENT, I fed all the observations I had into the AI. In particular, I couldn't get the ENT to explain why he visually saw, via a scope, evidence of allergic reaction in my sinuses, but then later concluded, after an allergy test, that it couldn't be treated via allergy medication. I asked this question a few times and he just never answered.

ChatGPT surfaced a NIH study that concluded that 20% of people have allergic reactions that are isolated to a body location, and that shoulder "skin prick" testing may not reveal. I asked him about that and he said "that's not how allergies work". Full stop. He was unwilling to even look at the study.

He prescribed a CPAP and regular nebulizer treatments. Side story: the CPAP place sent me a SMS message that I couldn't recognize was not a phishing attempt, and when I reached out to inquire who they were they never replied.

So I decided: Let me just try taking a second-gen allergy tablet every day and see what happens.

My sinus infections have gone away. Previously I was getting a major sinus infection at least quarterly. Maybe he's right that allergies don't work that way, but allergy tablets have absolutely solved my problem. Which I'm thankful for because I tried a CPAP for a solid month a few years ago and I just could not get used to it, and was sleeping like crap.

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

#92

Post by darepublic »

I would like if we could have a site where you submit your MRI then doctor commenters anonymously post their opinion. In general I want a forum where.. when people come with questions for which there are varying opinions we don't just have people leave their 2c and then jet. The thread persists, duplicated ideas get merged, erroneous statements get purged and gradually we refine shining truth

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

#94

Post by nostrebored »

I don’t understand the negative reactions. Medical care as it exists requires the doctor and patient to have their brains switched on. I’ve almost never had a problem where a doctor provides me with a diagnosis and I go about my day. Most of the times that I have, I’ve been confident about the problem and known what I needed. The doctor was a barrier to accessing care.

Dr. GPT is a good brainstorming tool. It helps synthesize information in a way that primary texts don’t. But it does force you to say “that doesn’t make sense”.

I do think that people saying “doctors don’t know the state of the art” have a weaker case. If you think about it in terms of token density during pretraining and how post training datasets are constructed, I think it would take us a very long time to adapt to any fundamental shifts. If we have forgotten how to cure scurvy, how many journal articles would it take before we adapt to a discovery?

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

#95

Post by engeljohnb »

sxg wrote: post #6

I'm a radiologist but can't really weigh in without seeing the full 3D MRI dataset. Regarding this point: > They performed shockwave therapy on my shoulder even though a recent clinical practice guideline says clinicians should not use or recommend shockwave therapy for rotator-cuff tendinopathy without calcification; I was told during ultrasound that there was no calcification. Ultrasound isn't a great way to assess…

> I'm a radiologist

Any comment that doesn't start with this or similar qulaification should be taken with a grain of salt (yes, including this one).

Medical imaging is one of those things everyone thinks is simple because they don't know what they don't know. I'm a cardiac sonographer, and I have to assume radiologists hear at least as many eye-rolling takes on AI coming for their job as I do.

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

#96

Post by rmbyrro »

eqvinox wrote: post #65

> My hope is that in a couple of model generations, we'll trust AI to review MRIs the way we trust it to proofread our emails. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1 I've started asking my doctors whether they use AI, and if they say yes look for another one.

That study seems to be confounding factors and rushing to a questionable conclusion.

A very plausible explanation for the adenoma detection rate to have gone down is simply that its prevalence went down among the population in the second three-month period.

This was not a randomized trial. Concluding that "AI usage degrades physicians' skills" is questionable at the very least.

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

#97

Post by nostrebored »

linsomniac wrote: post #91

~2 years ago I used ChatGPT "deep research" to investigate a chronic sinus infection I'd been fighting for ~3 years. After seeing 3 GPs and 3 visits with an ENT, I fed all the observations I had into the AI. In particular, I couldn't get the ENT to explain why he visually saw, via a scope, evidence of allergic reaction in my sinuses, but then later concluded, after an allergy test, that it couldn't be treated via all…

Daily allergy tablets are associated with huge increases in early onset Alzheimer’s. Glad you found something that works, but might be good to get some of the allergen injections :)

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

#98

Post by bflesch »

ohyes wrote: post #73
sxg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your argument, but it's not exactly news that an expert found a flaw in a popular tool. You could say the same about Wikipedia--experts have tons of issues with it, but Wikipedia still provides value to non-experts. The most likely alternative to Wikipedia for non-experts is simply not trying to learn anything new. Similarly with LLMs, you can't just write them off entirely because they sometimes provide mislea…

The free alternative to Wikipedia is the library, not “don’t learn anything new ever”. I find Claude is surprisingly similar to a confident but incorrect coworker, with the benefit that Claude will reevaluate when I correct it.

Claude will do everything to retain you as a user, because that's one of their most important metrics.

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

#99

Post by snackerblues »

Legend2440 wrote: post #46
drw85 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nightmare because the AI is just generating a random text that fits the question.

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

[flagged]

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

#100

Post by throwforfeds »

I've seen a lot of friends and family members almost immediately get offered surgery for shoulder pain. It's just often the default for people that do surgeries for a living.

I also had a pretty painful shoulder issue at one point, where the pain just wasn't subsiding for months. I tried massages and acupuncture as I didn't want to do surgery, but it wasn't helping at all. The thing that fixed it for me was just really focusing on doing pull-ups. I couldn't do them at all when I started, so I began with dead hangs and scapular pull-ups, eventually progressing to regular pull-ups, and then training with a "grease-the-groove" method once I could get a few per set. I stopped the training schedule once I was getting in around 17 pull-ups per set, and now just do 6 sets of about 7-8 pullups 3x per week spaced throughout the day. I'll also do some shoulder mobility drills [1].

Whenever I get lazy about keeping up with them inevitably discomfort will start arising again, but it goes away once I get back to strengthening.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP8YmmRMz6I

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