Beside ferritin, hemoglobin shouldn't be overlooked as the determinant of iron status. Hemoglobin is a part of the CBC (Complete Blood Count) test. Iron supplements are notorious for irritating the stomach, worsening gastritis and acid reflux. Even iron bisglycinate, while fully effective, is a significant stomach irritant. Ferric pyrophosphate might be safer, and I'm trying it now, but I have to take it twice a day…
> As long as it is in the normal range for your sex and age, you're fine even if your ferritin remains at 0. This is simply wrong when one considers that iron has many bodily functions outside of hemoglobin, such as acting as a cofactor in tyrosine hydroxylase for dopamine synthesis.
I solved my mystery fatigue with AI
11–20 of 27 posts
Re: I solved my mystery fatigue with AI
#12Maybe I am missing it, but I don’t see where AI solved anything in this anecdote. Rather, a team of medical professionals and a patient willing to advocate for herself did.
If AI enabled her to advocate for herself to the right professionals, and do so with data in hand, that’s huge. AI guiding a process is valuable even if it doesn’t replace all the parts of the process.
She said she started logging calories but recognized the carb connection before she logged carbs.
I kept waiting for the payoff where the AI led to something, but it never came.
Re: I solved my mystery fatigue with AI
#13There is a lot of authoritative sounding text here but no real explanation of how this huge process solved the mystery fatigue. In fact she says in the middle that the specialist she saw was more valuable. Toward the end she mentions experiments that were run, but the heavy hitters appear to be from specialists adjusting the medication related to her tumor treatment and a real person reviewing her food diary and noti…
My gut as a physician says AI will revolutionize primary care the most and the premise of AI having more specialized knowledge than a PCP holds water - I think the future of primary care is AI equipped midlevel providers - so I was very excited by the intro only to be let down. A lot of buzz about nothing sadly. The only takeaway here is logging helps detect patterns, we already knew that.
Re: I solved my mystery fatigue with AI
#14Beside ferritin, hemoglobin shouldn't be overlooked as the determinant of iron status. Hemoglobin is a part of the CBC (Complete Blood Count) test. Iron supplements are notorious for irritating the stomach, worsening gastritis and acid reflux. Even iron bisglycinate, while fully effective, is a significant stomach irritant. Ferric pyrophosphate might be safer, and I'm trying it now, but I have to take it twice a day…
Have you tried supplementing iron every other day instead? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12372323/
Re: I solved my mystery fatigue with AI
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
My gut as a physician says AI will revolutionize primary care the most and the premise of AI having more specialized knowledge than a PCP holds water - I think the future of primary care is AI equipped midlevel providers - so I was very excited by the intro only to be let down. A lot of buzz about nothing sadly. The only takeaway here is logging helps detect patterns, we already knew that.
For simple things, if an AI (combined with blood tests) can do what the doctor can do, then technically I don't need the doctor. I also don't need the friction that comes in working with a doctor, considering the AI is close to frictionless.
I feel like this bit is more of a problem than many folks realize. I know that people see "frictionless" as a desirable trait, but for many of the things folks are using AI for these days, you're gonna want "push-back" sometimes. Especially in cases of health care and computer programming, there are times when the user is straight-up wrong about what they're trying to do, say, or believe, and the last thing you wanna hear when your life or job or the lives or jobs of others are on the line and you're about to make a huge mistake is "You're absolutely right! Let me get right on doing that for you!"
Re: I solved my mystery fatigue with AI
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
For simple things, if an AI (combined with blood tests) can do what the doctor can do, then technically I don't need the doctor. I also don't need the friction that comes in working with a doctor, considering the AI is close to frictionless.
> ... "considering the AI is close to frictionless" ... I feel like this bit is more of a problem than many folks realize. I know that people see "frictionless" as a desirable trait, but for many of the things folks are using AI for these days, you're gonna want "push-back" sometimes. Especially in cases of health care and computer programming, there are times when the user is straight-up wrong about what they're try…
Re: I solved my mystery fatigue with AI
#17AI helped me figure out my symptoms were related to histamine issues. This was really hard to track down. I started to tune into chicken and eggs causing me issues, but (1) I wasn’t actually allergic (2) chicken and rice is a standard safe diet (3) chicken is low histamine itself, but can trigger histamine release . It was further complicated because a bunch of foods didn’t consistently trigger reactions.
It was only after I tracked a bunch of foods and tried a bunch of different remedies that Claude was able to track down the pattern. From there, I was able to understand what foods would trigger my issues.
Re: I solved my mystery fatigue with AI
#18Beside ferritin, hemoglobin shouldn't be overlooked as the determinant of iron status. Hemoglobin is a part of the CBC (Complete Blood Count) test. Iron supplements are notorious for irritating the stomach, worsening gastritis and acid reflux. Even iron bisglycinate, while fully effective, is a significant stomach irritant. Ferric pyrophosphate might be safer, and I'm trying it now, but I have to take it twice a day…
Re: I solved my mystery fatigue with AI
#19If the article author saw this, you can reach at me, I will tell u the whole method and details, for free, for sure.
Because I think you were from China, too.
Re: I solved my mystery fatigue with AI
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
My gut as a physician says AI will revolutionize primary care the most and the premise of AI having more specialized knowledge than a PCP holds water - I think the future of primary care is AI equipped midlevel providers - so I was very excited by the intro only to be let down. A lot of buzz about nothing sadly. The only takeaway here is logging helps detect patterns, we already knew that.
For simple things, if an AI (combined with blood tests) can do what the doctor can do, then technically I don't need the doctor. I also don't need the friction that comes in working with a doctor, considering the AI is close to frictionless.
That’s the goal for doctors too. It would be great to get simple things off the system.
But I think the more realistic intermediate step is a trained person cheaper than a doctor - nurse, PA, etc - aided by AI. The current generation of agentic AI doesn’t seem to be there yet and is too agreeable from RL.
“you’re probably fine sleep it off combined with: drink more water, eat healthier, exercise more, sleep better, consume less alcohol and quit smoking/vaping” +/- “we’ll check some labs to make sure” is the correct answer for probably 95%+ of encounters so it’s not hard for an automated system to handle most simple things, even without AI.