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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

#511

Post by aix1 »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #214
tarellel wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an odd field, obviously it’s in high demand for diagnostics and anytime you have to do an xray, MRI, etc you have to wait hours for one to become available. I think they’re artificially stunting the field to raise their wages. For example in my city the medical school only accepts 11 people into the program a year. (With an average graduation rate or 3-5). My niece has been trying for 2 years and finally got in…

free market solution is just order an x-ray machine from alibaba and setup shop. you could add a credit card swiper + ID + facial recognition to plausibly avoid over-xraying people These days Xray machines - they don't even suit up in lead or stand behind a wall , just point and shoot. In fact they're nice and portable. I wish i had a xray machine at home.

And, to save on combined shipping, a cobalt-60 machine to zap the odd tumour? :)

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

#512

Post by FredF--- »

Thank you for sharing. I'm about to get my MRI scan on my right shoulder tomorrow. Now I'm wondering what I'm going to do even if the result shows benign. Certainly, I would double check the result if it's concerning, should I also check a comforting result in case the truth is less comforting?

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

#513

Post by FromTheFirstIn »

aspenmartin wrote: post #467
FromTheFirstIn wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if your definition of consciousness can fit these things then you’re more open minded than I care to be. Consciousness isn’t really guessing the next thing to say- it’s hard to say what it is, obviously, but blindly feeling forwards with each new conversation doesn’t seem like consciousness or learning to me.

We aren't talking about consciousness, we're talking about learning. > Consciousness isn’t really guessing the next thing to say- I don't know what consciousness is either and these debates are a dumpster fire when they happen, but it sounds like you're pulling forward this "LLMs are just predicting the next token" (true by construction) implies that they can't learn or reason or be conscious (2/3 are wrong, the last…

Yes, I think we simply disagree. I think you know what LLMs are based on our other thread and if you think something important happens when you get a large enough context vector I don’t think there’s much I can say to change your mind. It seems unlikely to me!

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

#514

Post by greybox555 »

simianwords wrote: post #52
mettamage wrote: post #22

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)

If you have sleep issue related to overthinking or racing mind, you may try fastsleep.app

Instead of music, long podcasts you are given something to imagine at a time interval.

Like if you hear "calm river", imagine that. If you hear "heavy rain over a tree", imagine that.

In short → Close your eyes, listen & imagine.

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

#515

Post by mncharity »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #287
Aurornis wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have multiple LLM subscriptions at any given time, plus an array of local models. When I ask a question outside of my domain of expertise I like to ask all of the LLMs I have access to. I also create separate sessions and ask the same question multiple ways. It’s revealing to see how many different and contradictory answers I get, most of which are presented confidently. The last time I ran a medical question throu…

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.

With direct discussion, the same tendency to harmonize towards groupthink applies.

Aside from the statelessness GP mentioned, one can insert anti-conciliatory intermediation. "I saw a random claim go by, but something about it seems not quite right. What am I missing? They said: [...]." Weaponizing the bias, and orchestrating the discourse from the harness.

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

#516

Post by [deleted] »

kgeist wrote: post #364
azan_ wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it possible? You can't diagnose tuberculosis just based on imaging and tuberculosis hospital has to know that!

Yeah, I know! It was strange. They gave me a test, and it came back negative, but they insisted it was negative because I had "latent tuberculosis," which supposedly wasn't detectable by the test yet but was about to become active. I forgot to mention that, besides getting a second opinion from another radiologist, I also took a more modern test at another private clinic. That test has better detection rates than the…

[deleted]

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

#517

Post by jdblair »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #117

> 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 best mechanic I ever had kept my ‘98 Subaru going past 200k miles. Once during a repair I asked him to do an inspection and tell me if there was anything else I should replace. He told me not to do that, and that any mechanic would always find something, but not necessarily the next thing to break.

He said it better using an expression I hadn’t heard before or since, something like “don’t go looking for goats when your herd is already with you.”

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

#518

Post by Eufrat »

anon84873628 wrote: post #504
Eufrat wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the promise of these models is to help people make more informed decisions. Improving the knowledge economy and general understanding. The problem is these are just statistical models at the end of the day, so you need to know something to be able to identify the errors. You can’t let them really be autonomous and you also can’t really have people turn into glorified approvers. If the machine is correct 8…

Why should we not expect a computer vision model to outperform humans on reading medical images? The human experts are literally just a trained biological neural network. In this domain they are not capable of anything a computer can't already do.

> Why should we not expect a computer vision model to outperform humans on reading medical images?

Humans can identify. A computer vision model can return a statistical value. Both can make errors, but these errors are orthogonal to how we work and what is being asked of them. I think a CV model can absolutely provide value as augmentation. Identifying possible misses or a different diagnosis worth considering, but that is not what is being asked of them here. The pitch by Altman and Amodei is not to say, “This tool that might cost $1,000/month can help increase the accuracy of your diagnoses by 10%,” instead it’s, “This tool can allow you to keep 10% of your workers to monitor it and you can fire the rest. Also, the workers carry all the liability.”

> The human experts are literally just a trained biological neural network. In this domain they are not capable of anything a computer can't already do.

People need to stop making this baseless claim. Human beings are not stochastic computing devices, we are not neural networks. We don’t fully understand human cognition and intelligence. I have the highest confidence we will figure it out one day, though.

Yes, neural networks were based on a superficial view of the human brain, that’s it. For instance, it is biological impossible for the human brain to do backpropagation, which is kind of important for a modern neural net.

This really rubs me the wrong way because it's objectively false, but people keep bring it up because I think people want it to be true rather than accepting generative AI for what it is: a tool with a bunch of caveats.

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

#519

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

amluto wrote: post #487
linsomniac wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be only for first generation, drowsy-making, tablets. Second gen formulas don't cross over the blood/brain barrier. https://www.myalzteam.com/resources/zyrtec-and-alzheimers-me... There IS one year-old finding that suddenly stopping Zyrtec after daily 3-month use may lead to nasty itching, and if that happens you can re-start and then taper off. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-communications/fda-r…

Zyrtec/cetirizine is a weird one. Everyone seems to agree that it is a second-generation antihistamine. The FDA seems to play along. But there is no particular shortage of anecdotal evidence of people who find it quite sedating (hi there!), there are some papers questioning its status [0], and the FAA puts it in a category with diphenhydramine, not with loratadine and fexofenadine [1]. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.go…

Ceterizine does cross the BBB to some extent, just less so than a lot of furst gen ones. So it can still have some hypnotic effects, sure.

But that's not the important difference here. The important difference is that ceterizine has negligible antimuscarinic effects, unlike DPH, meclizine, cyclizine et al. Antimuscarinics are nasty drugs, and the antimuscarinic activity(and sometimes other non-histaminergic activity as well) is why a lot of first generation antihistamines are so bad for your brain.

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

#520

Post by dirkt »

Aurornis wrote: post #167
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #117

> 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…

I have multiple LLM subscriptions at any given time, plus an array of local models. When I ask a question outside of my domain of expertise I like to ask all of the LLMs I have access to. I also create separate sessions and ask the same question multiple ways. It’s revealing to see how many different and contradictory answers I get, most of which are presented confidently. The last time I ran a medical question throu…

What happened to VERIFYING an answer? Does nobody do that anymore?

When I ask an LLM, I trace the sources, and see if they make sense.

More often than not the sources don't actually say anything about the topic in particular...

> It’s also scary how easily you can lead each LLM to the answer you have in mind.

Exactly. Which is why "treat an LLM like a human expert who can answer your question" doesn't work. It's more like a human bullshitter who makes up convincing looking answers, and tries to please you. If the answers have actually some grounding in the training material, that's useful as some kind of holistic google, but often it's not.

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