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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

#571

Post by [deleted] »

Sabinus wrote: post #452
nkrisc wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's like when finding out about the sex of your baby via ultrasound before they're born. If you're told it's a boy, you can be pretty certain you're getting a boy. If you're told it's a girl, you shouldn't get too attached to the idea. The ultrasound tech might just have missed the evidence your baby was a boy.

[deleted]

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

#572

Post by simianwords »

swiftcoder wrote: post #323
simianwords wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You know you could just ask it.

Which would tell you what, exactly? The whole root of the problem is that the model doesn’t “know” either

This is untrue and probably shows lack of experience with using LLMs. In my experience, each time I get some hallucination, I can ask the llm whether it hallucinated or not and I get a correct response.

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

#573

Post by palata »

dirkt wrote: post #520
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…

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…

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

The problem with medical advice is that you may not be competent to verify the answer, right?

I agree that asking 5 LLMs to vote and trusting the answer is totally the wrong approach, of course. But LLMs (and traditional material) can help getting more informed. For instance, instead of going to your doctor with the LLM diagnosis and trying to convince the doctor that the LLM is right, you can try to build your own understanding of the problem and go ask the doctor to explain to you what you understood correctly and what you misunderstood.

If you have some understanding, it's harder for a specialist to bullshit you. But you need your own critical thinking and you need to put effort into actually learning something, blindly trusting and repeating what LLMs say doesn't help.

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

#574

Post by bonesss »

StefanBatory wrote: post #548
nostrebored wrote: post #94

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 s…

> I do think that people saying “doctors don’t know the state of the art” have a weaker case. This is kinda the case though. In Poland I met only one psychiatrist that knew about DSM-5. In this year. DSM-5 was a thing from 2013. Doctors are people just as us, not every single of them is good.

Many DSM-5 diagnosis come into effect with the ICD-11, ICD-10 doesn't have a good deal of them, and that rollout is still fresh & ongoing.

It is kinda spooky, though, to have freshly minted doctors from a few years back whose school-knowledge will forever be "outdated and archaic" based on standards published before they were in school.

Some good advice I got: treat this as a generation shift, find younger and newer doctors who are familiar with the "modern" standards.

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

#575

Post by comboy »

azan_ wrote: post #354
kgeist wrote: post #341

A few years ago (before the AI craze), I was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis. I had a chronic cough, and an outsourced radiologist at a clinic found signs of tuberculosis. The findings were sent to the city's tuberculosis hospital, as required by the country's law. The doctors there took the radiologist's conclusion at face value and required me to stay at their hospital for at least 8 months under a strict, prison-li…

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

Incentives.

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

#576

Post by rpastuszak »

kgeist wrote: post #341

A few years ago (before the AI craze), I was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis. I had a chronic cough, and an outsourced radiologist at a clinic found signs of tuberculosis. The findings were sent to the city's tuberculosis hospital, as required by the country's law. The doctors there took the radiologist's conclusion at face value and required me to stay at their hospital for at least 8 months under a strict, prison-li…

Asking for a friend, who is in a somewhat similar predicament — it wasn’t Portugal, was it?

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

#577

Post by peyton »

bonesss wrote: post #574
StefanBatory wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do think that people saying “doctors don’t know the state of the art” have a weaker case. This is kinda the case though. In Poland I met only one psychiatrist that knew about DSM-5. In this year. DSM-5 was a thing from 2013. Doctors are people just as us, not every single of them is good.

Many DSM-5 diagnosis come into effect with the ICD-11, ICD-10 doesn't have a good deal of them, and that rollout is still fresh & ongoing. It is kinda spooky, though, to have freshly minted doctors from a few years back whose school-knowledge will forever be "outdated and archaic" based on standards published before they were in school. Some good advice I got: treat this as a generation shift, find younger and newer…

APA guidelines come with expiration dates [1]. 10 years is the maximum.

Churn is built in to the specialty. Read into that what you will.

[1]: https://www.apa.org/practice/guidelines/criteria?item=5

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

#578

Post by ncruces »

ryukoposting wrote: post #531
marcus_holmes wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree, and I think we'll see more use of formal methods with LLMs for this reason

At a certain point it just feels like we're reinventing the concept of programming languages from first principles.

I'm using this new programming language: it's called LLM prompting, and everything is undefined behavior.

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

#579

Post by dumb1224 »

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 tried that AI diagnosis for my 15 old Ford C MAx too, however with a diagnostic problem the issue is unless you've got the ground truth, there's simply no way to verify any tool / human with a metric that you can compare and decide on future tasks.

The AI might be very good at diagnosing all minor issues, but might not lead to a successful repair, whereas human mechanics are extremely good on 80% of major issues that's not the ground truth, but will lead to successful repairs (that might not address the root but simply patch it). So it comes down to manage expectation / outcomes.

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

#580

Post by ncruces »

palata wrote: post #570
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…

> It’s also scary how easily you can lead each LLM to the answer you have in mind. Scary in this context of course, but I find that it is an interesting thought for coding: it suggests that maybe , a developer who knows what they are doing will end up leading the LLM to coding something that make more sense than a developer who doesn't know and just vibe-codes blindly. Sounds pretty obvious, but I wanted to say it.

And all it takes is not blindingly accepting the first thing it spews if you suspect there's a better answer (and are in a position to evaluate that better answer).
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