the more awesome thing to me is that you can run the MRI through an ensemble of LLMs and check to see if they converge among each other
I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
471–480 of 748 posts
Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is always one "The Diagnosis". No, that is not true at all. This is a kind of thinking a lot of programmers fall prey to. The real world, outside of code, is a very fuzzy and inherently analog place. There is very rarely one in any complex system having a complex problem needing a complex solution. At some point even the definition of diagnosis gets fuzzy. The best demonstration of this in medicine is probabl…
Pyschiatry gets complicated because the failures are not mechanical. Even if you could image every single neuron in a person's head we do not have a very good way to define an algorithm for these issues. I do not have a good answer for psychiatry. > This is a kind of thinking a lot of programmers fall prey to. The real world, outside of code, is a very fuzzy and inherently analog place. Having said that, I would vehe…
There's quite a few diseases and conditions that don't have definitive tests. For example, alzheimer's and parkinsons are diagnosed based on medical history and symptoms. With alzheimer's an autopsy can tell for sure but that's not much help for a patient. I'm sure there's other things out there with similar situations. Hard to come up with "the one true" diagnosis with an definitive way to determine it.
Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo I don’t think that’s true. Avoiding this mistake requires knowing that an ultrasound may not detect calcification. For a patient reading their own report, I don’t think that’s intuitive. I would expect most people to read “no calcifications” and assume that their joint has no calcifications.
Most people should have learned at a young age that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. My 8 year old understands this. After all, you can rarely ever prove something does not exist, only that it is unlikely to exist. If a report states that X was not found, it does not mean X did not exist, it means it was not found. What may be lost on the layperson is the nuance and understanding of how thorough or not…
> Most people should have learned at a young age that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
That might be true, but it is definitely not the world we live in.
Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Interesting. There recently was an article about how premenopausal and menopausal women are taking antihistamines with pepcid to help them sleep due to it going viral on tiktok.
https://www.thecut.com/article/antihistamines-pepcid-ac-peri...
> Then, a few months ago, Angela saw a social-media post from a woman who took daily anti-histamines (like Allegra, Claritin, or Zyrtec) plus Pepcid AC (a common antacid) for her perimenopause symptoms. Her results, as reported, sounded miraculous: no more brain fog, no more tossing and turning all night. Even her mood vastly improved.
Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
#475This seems less a demonstration of competence than of accessibility.
Often we only get 10-15 minutes with the one health professional that makes a determination and sets the path of your life for some time.
As opposed to being able to spend hours with an LLM that in many ways feels more sympathetic and helpful - even though it's competence is in question.
So here we are:
1. with doctors processing patients every 10 minutes like a machine.
2. and machine's processing, for a patient, at any hour like a human.
Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
#476[dead]
Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pyschiatry gets complicated because the failures are not mechanical. Even if you could image every single neuron in a person's head we do not have a very good way to define an algorithm for these issues. I do not have a good answer for psychiatry. > This is a kind of thinking a lot of programmers fall prey to. The real world, outside of code, is a very fuzzy and inherently analog place. Having said that, I would vehe…
There's quite a few diseases and conditions that don't have definitive tests. For example, alzheimer's and parkinsons are diagnosed based on medical history and symptoms. With alzheimer's an autopsy can tell for sure but that's not much help for a patient. I'm sure there's other things out there with similar situations. Hard to come up with "the one true" diagnosis with an definitive way to determine it.
> With alzheimer's an autopsy can tell for sure but that's not much help for a patient.
Ok let us unpack this statement.
For your point to hold, I would have to be saying "all kinds of practical diagnostics are invented now. No progress can be made in better diagnostics".
If Alzheimer's can be validated by slicing open a dead patient, there is a causal mechanical explanation for the disease. If we can not confirm that defect without slicing open the patient, that is a limitation of 2026 tools. The "One True Diagnosis" is an Oracle explanation that all real diagnostic techniques try to approach in the asymptotic sense, and it is helpful exactly because it clarifies in discussions like this.
There are going to be diseases where we do not yet have causal explanations. Or where we treat them without establishing them. Hypertension is one example: while technically it can be caused by vascular stiffness, some weirdness with the RAAS system, some hyperadrenergic weirdness, practically you get a lot of mileage out of just prescribing people telmisartan if they're old.
That does not mean the frontier of hypertension is settled, or the 10% who do not have a vascular stiffness problem would not benefit from better causal models of hypertension. Science is us continuously pushing back against the fog: of the tools we have in 2026, some are great, some are imperfect, some are promising etc.
Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So an ultrasound report can state there are no calcifications while a plain radiograph can report the presence of calcifications without being inconsistent. Obviously very confusing to patients and people unfamiliar with medical jargon This is being overly nice, I think. Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo. You would have to assume that every type of diagnosis instrument has infinite clarity and is a…
> Anyone who doesn't understand this is an idiot imo I don’t think that’s true. Avoiding this mistake requires knowing that an ultrasound may not detect calcification. For a patient reading their own report, I don’t think that’s intuitive. I would expect most people to read “no calcifications” and assume that their joint has no calcifications.
It’s 2026 and my computer will happily give me the right answer even when i make typos. I love it.
Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
#479Nice, I have Claude, now I just need an MRI (which in some countries is sort of a hard requirement still unfortunately, long queues)
Re: I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever let the LLMs “discuss” with each other to see if that would give better answers? You might end up with the answer from the most persuasive LLM, but you might also end up with better results. Wonder if there is a paper out there on this.
The problem is how do you know whether the answer is just the most persuasive or actually the most accurate one? It's hard to figure this out without domain knowledge.
I dunno, I could see it working.
I do something similar with reviewing code: I have one agent write the code and another reviews it, then they go back and forth for a bit improving the code. Seems to yield better results than one agent alone.
Seems like a similar principle.