My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
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My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
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Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
#2This was not what I was expecting. The doctors I know are mostly miserable; stuck between the independence but also the burden of running their own practice, or or else working for a giant health system and having no control over their own days. You can see how an LLM might be preferable, especially when managing a chronic, degenerative condition. I have a family member with stage 3 kidney disease who sees a nephrologist, and there's nothing you can actually do. No one in their right mind would recommend a kidney transplant, let alone dialysis for someone with moderately impaired kidneys. All you can do is treat the symptoms as they come up and monitor for significant drops in function.
Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
#3Worriesome for sure.
However I would say that the cited studies are somewhat outdated already compared e.g. with GPT-5-Thinking doing 2mins of reasoning/search about a medical question. As far as I know Deepseeks search capabilities are not comparable and non of the models in the study spend a comparable amount of compute answering your specific question.
Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
#4I think the article can basically be summed up as "GenAI sychophancy should have a health warning similar to social media". It's a helluva drug to be constantly rewarded and flattered by an algorithm.
Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
#5A sick family member told me something along the lines of, "I know how to work with AI to get the answer." I interpret that to mean he asks it questions until it tells him what he wants to hear.
Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
#6The dangers are obvious (and also there are some fascinating insights into how healthcare works practically in China). I wonder if some kind of "second opinion" antagonistic approach might reduce the risks.
Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
#7Worriesome for sure. However I would say that the cited studies are somewhat outdated already compared e.g. with GPT-5-Thinking doing 2mins of reasoning/search about a medical question. As far as I know Deepseeks search capabilities are not comparable and non of the models in the study spend a comparable amount of compute answering your specific question.
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Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
#8This almost certainly isn't only a China problem. I've observed UK users asking questions about diabetes and other health advice. We also have an inexpensive (free-at-point of use for most stuff) but stretched healthcare system. Doubtless there are US users looking at the cost of their healthcare and resorting to ChatGPT instead too.
In companies people talk about Shadow-IT happening when IT doesn't cover the user needs. We should probably label this stuff Shadow-Health.
To some extent, the deployment of a publicly funded AI health chat bot, where the responses can be analysed by healthcare professionals to at least prevent future harm is probably significantly less bad than telling people not to ask AI questions and consult the existing stretched infrastructure. Because people will ask the questions regardless.
Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
#9A sick family member told me something along the lines of, "I know how to work with AI to get the answer." I interpret that to mean he asks it questions until it tells him what he wants to hear.
Indeed, real doctors have the advantage of understanding how to treat humans that are incapacitated. =3
Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
#10The problem is not reliance on AI but that the AI is not ready yet and using general-purpose models.
There isn't simply enough doctors to go around and the average one isn't as knowledgeable as you would want. Everything suggests that when it comes to diagnosis ML systems should be better in the long run on average.
Especially with a quickly aging population there is no alternative if we want people to have healthcare on a sensible level.