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I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week

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Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week

#21

Post by herpdyderp »

burningChrome wrote: post #5
SoftTalker wrote: post #4

More generally don't try to be your own doctor. Whether you're using LLMs or just searching the web for symptoms, it's way too easy for an untrained person to get way off track. If you want to be a doctor, go to medical school. Otherwise talk to someone who did.

When the internet was completely booming and Google was taking over the search engine world, I asked my Doctor if he was afraid that people were going to start getting their medical advice from Google. He basically said, "I'm not worried yet. But I would never recommend someone do that. If you have health insurance, that's what you pay for, not for Google to tell you you're just fine, you really don't have cancer." T…

I have health insurance. I don't feel like I get anything out of paying for it, I still get massive bills whenever I use it.

Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week

#22

Post by sofixa »

reenorap wrote: post #17

[flagged]

> But at least ChatGPT doesn't try to rush you through and ignore your worries just because they want to make their next appoint.

But it is a sycophant and will confirm your suspicions, whatever they are and regardless if they're true.

Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week

#23

Post by morshu9001 »

cogman10 wrote: post #10

Yikes. But I have to say that prompt is crazy bad. AI is VERY good at using your prompt as the basis for the response, if you say "I don't think it's an emergency" AI will write a response that is "it's not an emergency" I did a test with the first prompt and the immediate answer I got was "this looks like lyme disease".

I figured this out diagnosing car trouble. Tried a few separate chats, and my natural response patterns were always leading it down the path to "your car is totaled and will also explode at any moment." Going about it a different way, I got it to suggest a simple culprit that I was able to confirm pretty thoroughly (fuel pressure sensor), and fixed it.

Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week

#24

Post by jfindper »

xiphias2 wrote: post #11

Another poorly written article that doesn't even specify the LLM being used. Both ChatGPT o3 and 5.1 Pro models helped me a lot diagnosing illnesses with the right queries. I am using lots of queries with different context / context length for medical queries as they are very serious. Also they have better answer if I am using medical language as they retrieve answers from higher quality articles. I still went to doc…

The lack of awareness to advocate using LLMs for medical advice on an article about how bad of an idea that is... It's astounding.

Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week

#25

Post by hansmayer »

> "If you read nothing else, read this: do not ever use an AI or the internet for medical advice. Go to a doctor."

Yeah, no shit Sherlock? I´d be absolutely embarrassed to even admit to something like this, let alone share the "wisdom perls" like "dont use a machine which guesses its outputs based on whatever text it has been fed" to freaking diagnose yourself? Who would have thought, an individual professional with decades in theoretical and practical training, AND actual human intelligence (Or do we need to call it HGI now), plus tons of experience is more trustworthy, reliable and qualified to deal with something as serious as human body. Plus there are hundreds of thousands of such individuals and they dont need to boil an ocean every time they are solving a problem in their domain of expertise. Compared to a product of entshittified tech industry which in the recent years has only ever given us irrelevant "apps" to live in, without addressing really important issues of our time. Heck, even Peter Thiel agrees with this, at least in his "Zero to one" he did.

Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week

#26

Post by only-one1701 »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #16
xiphias2 wrote: post #11

Another poorly written article that doesn't even specify the LLM being used. Both ChatGPT o3 and 5.1 Pro models helped me a lot diagnosing illnesses with the right queries. I am using lots of queries with different context / context length for medical queries as they are very serious. Also they have better answer if I am using medical language as they retrieve answers from higher quality articles. I still went to doc…

Read to the bottom. I didn't specify the LLM because it doesn't matter. It's not the fault of the LLM, it's the fault of the user

It’s the fault of the tool!

Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week

#27

Post by cheald »

I think the author took the wrong lesson here. I've had doctors misdiagnose me just as readily as I've had LLMs misdiagnose me - but I can sit there and plug at an LLM in separate unrelated contexts for hours if I'd like, and follow up assertions with checks to primary sources. That's not to say that LLMs replace doctors, but that neither is perfect and that at the end of the day you have to have your brain turned on.

The real lesson here is "learn to use an LLM without asking leading questions". The author is correct, they're very good at picking up the subtext of what you are actually asking about and shaping their responses to match. That is, after all, the entire purpose of an LLM. If you can learn to query in such a way that you avoid introducing unintended bias, and you learn to recognize when you've "tainted" a conversation and start a new one, they're marvelous exploratory (and even diagnostic) tools. But you absolutely cannot stop with their outputs - primary sources and expert input remain supreme. This should be particularly obvious to any actual experts who do use these tools on a regular basis - such as developers.

Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week

#28

Post by only-one1701 »

arjie wrote: post #14
only-one1701 wrote: post #3

Oh my God dude it’s ok to say “don’t use LLMs to diagnose yourself, that’s not what they’re for.” You don’t need to apologize for using LLMs wrong.

The first sentence of the article says: > If you read nothing else, read this: do not ever use an AI or the internet for medical advice. Your comment seems out of place unless the article was edited in the 10 minutes since the comment was written.

I was referring to the word “misused” in the title.

Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week

#29

Post by Starlevel004 »

> If you read nothing else, read this: do not ever use an AI or the internet for medical advice.

I completely disagree. I think we should let this act as a form of natural selection, and once every pro-AI person is dead we can get back to doing normal things again.

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