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

antoine.fi

151–160 of 748 posts

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

#151

I feel like I'm going nuts. There are other commenters saying this is a good practice they've also done for other injuries. You are saying you are an actual radiologist and immediately clock the problems with its advice. I have seen this pattern over and over again. Anytime someone is an actual expert at anything, AI output appears insufficient or incomplete or outright misleading. It is only when you do not know wha…

It's like reading news articles. Seems reasonable until you read an article about something you know, then you see how wrong they can be.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hey what did you do to fix your sleep? Help us all and maybe an llm will index your diagnosis (hi ChatGPT)

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.

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

#153

As a radiologist I have found Claude and ChatGPT to be absolutely terrible at MRI and I would not trust it one bit. It has its merits if you need to research stuff that is more text based, but radiological images is just something that they cannot interpret good enough (yet)

It's like people who expect ChatGPT to be really good at chess because chess engines with super-human performance have been around for decades, so obviously the latest frontier LLM that took billions to train should find the task trivial.

Actually, I'm curious what ChatGPT 5.5's ELO is- I wouldn't be too surprised if it's 2000+ just from its basic understanding of chess principles from all the content it has digested.

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

#154
post #130
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they will improve, there is too much incentive to poison the datasets going forward. A lot of the models up to this point have been benefitted - like Google did - from essentially ‘pre SEO’ internet. Now the same tools are being used to generate nigh infinite good sounding bullshit, which poisons the dataset in all sorts of hard to detect ways. To add insult to injury, the human experts are also not as.…

Human doctors use LLMs to diagnose too OpenEvidence claims "More than 40% of U.S. physicians use it daily, and it handled around 20 million clinical consultations per month. Over 100 million Americans were treated by a doctor using it in 2025." https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/openevidence-chatgpt-for-doc...

This is a very misleading statement; most of those physicians are using LLMs to transcribe notes from visits and/or for billing purposes (e.g., proper billing codes).

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

#155

I feel like I'm going nuts. There are other commenters saying this is a good practice they've also done for other injuries. You are saying you are an actual radiologist and immediately clock the problems with its advice. I have seen this pattern over and over again. Anytime someone is an actual expert at anything, AI output appears insufficient or incomplete or outright misleading. It is only when you do not know wha…

[deleted]

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

#156
Its very interesting how people trust LLMs in domains they know little about.

Instead, it is my experiences with LLMs in a domain that I know very well that makes me skeptical of their performance across the board. I find issues in code review multiple times a day with their output, and they are explicitly and extensively trained on this use-case, unlike with the MRI data. Sometimes I veer into other domains I have decent knowledge about (construction, carpentry, landscaping) and LLMs disappoint me there as well.

I suppose Gell-Mann amnesia is a universal human quirk and not restricted to just the news.

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

#157

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

I’m wondering how many radiologist want to work all day, then come home and work.

Many can get paid fee-for-service for after hours work, so would probably prefer that.

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

#158

> There's something incredibly peaceful about being in the hands of an expert you trust. [...] AI can absolutely shatter that feeling in an uncomfortable way [...] but I don't know if I can fully trust AI either. This really is key. We know we can't trust the AI, but at the same time we're also more comfortable asking the AI for clarifications or confronting it. Not having a time-bound appointment or paying by the ho…

> The solution to uncertain information isn't more information, which the AI can certainly provide, it's better information, and AI cannot currently provide that.

I'd argue that AI _can_ currently provide that, but that it can't do it _reliably_, and that to non-experts it's impossible to differentiate, which makes it all the more dangerous.

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

#159

I feel like I'm going nuts. There are other commenters saying this is a good practice they've also done for other injuries. You are saying you are an actual radiologist and immediately clock the problems with its advice. I have seen this pattern over and over again. Anytime someone is an actual expert at anything, AI output appears insufficient or incomplete or outright misleading. It is only when you do not know wha…

This is the root of AI psychosis. There’s a lot of unpack here, and I won’t go too deep because you can’t really have a discussion with affected folks because their fundamental basis is not evidence, it’s belief. It is weirdly religious in a way, because if you were to present contrary evidence (e.g. experts in a field weighing in about how plausible sounding responses are bunk), you would only be told you don’t beli…

Human expertise is also improving all the time and not limited to just connecting dots. When AI seems to surpass a particular human, it's just because the human lacks broader knowledge and fails to investigate further.

An expert already knows they don't know everything. That was never the point. Critical thinking cannot be delegated to AI any more than it can be delegated to a book. There is nothing new going on here.

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

#160
post #9

Always worth a share for this scenario. It's not clear if LLMs are capable of doing actual analysis on medical imaging. For details see this article https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/frontier-models... > As detailed in a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, a team of researchers at Stanford University found that frontier AI models readily generated “detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces…

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…

It's not different- there's a line of research and reasoning where people who don't use LLM's regularly point out issues that have been known (and more or less solved) for more than a year now (which is an eternity in the LLM space).
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