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ChatGPT Health

openai.com

281–290 of 677 posts

Re: ChatGPT Health

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since someone else asked and you said you didn't remember, do you think he may have had Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH)? And the surgery which he had may have been a VP shunt (ventricular-peritoneal) -- something to move fluid away from his brain? Quite a mouthful for the layman and the symptoms you are describing would fit. NPH has one of my favorite mnemonic in medicine for students learning about the condition…

Now that you mention it, it may have been NPH. The thing is, I did the chatting with ChatGPT and handed the printout to the doc. Biology was never my strong suit, so my eyes glaze over when I see words like "Hydrocephalus" :-D

You might find it in the chat history.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#282
post #277

My uncle had an issue with his balance and slurred speech. Doctors claimed dementia and sent him home. It kept becoming worse and worse. Then one day I entered the symptoms in ChatGPT (or was it Gemini?) and asked it for the top 3 hypotheses. The first one was related to dementia. The second was something else (I forget the long name). I took all 3 to his primary care doc who had kept ignoring the problem, and asked…

General doctors aren't trained for problem solving, they're trained for memorization. The doctors that are good at problem solving aren't general doctors.

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT Health

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're a doctor you don't know what it's made up though. That's the trouble with AI. You can only be impressed if you know a subject well enough to know it's not just bullshitting like usual.

AI-guided self-medication is certainly problematic. Rubber-ducking your symptoms for free for as long as you need and then asking a doctor for their 2-minute opinion is IMHO the best way to go about healthcare in 2026. I live in a place where I can get anything related to healthcare and even surgery within the same day at an affordable price, and even here I've wasted days going to various specialists who just tried…

Your healthcare situation seems pretty darn good. What country is this?

Re: ChatGPT Health

#284
post #261
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These points seem to be arguments against giving your health data to anybody, not just to an AI company.

If there's no evidence that it will help you or others, then that's a pretty hard position to argue against. The parent commenter asked about this, and the response basically was that it didn't seem likely to be harmful, and now you're responding to that.

Yes, of course. "Assuming it's entirely useless, why giving your data to anyone" is a hard position to argue against, but unfortunately it's also completely pointless because of the unproven assumption. Besides, there are already enough indications in this thread alone that it is already very useful to many.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#285
post #277

My uncle had an issue with his balance and slurred speech. Doctors claimed dementia and sent him home. It kept becoming worse and worse. Then one day I entered the symptoms in ChatGPT (or was it Gemini?) and asked it for the top 3 hypotheses. The first one was related to dementia. The second was something else (I forget the long name). I took all 3 to his primary care doc who had kept ignoring the problem, and asked…

General doctors aren't trained for problem solving, they're trained for memorization. The doctors that are good at problem solving aren't general doctors.

This.

I wouldn't be surprised if AI was better than going to GP or many other specialists in majority of cases.

And the issue is not with the doctors themselves, but the complexity of human body.

Like many digestive issues can cause migraines or a ton of other problems. I am yet to see when someone is referred to gut health professional because of the migraine.

And a lot of similar cases when absolutely random system causes issues in seemingly unrelated system.

A lot of these problems are not life threatening thus just get ignored as they would take too much effort and cost to pinpoint.

AI on the other hand should be pretty good at figuring out those vague issues that you would never figured out otherwise.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#286
I woder wether this will have the same pitfalls as regular ChatGPT.

The latter implicitly assumes all your questions are personal. It seems to have no concept of context for its longer term retentions.

Certainly for health, non accute things seem matter a lott. This is why yoir personal doctor that has known you for decades will spot things beyond your current symptoms.

But ChatGTP will uncritically retain from that time you helped your teacher relative build her lesson plans that you "are a teacher in secondary education" or that time you helped diagnose a friends car trouble that you "drives a high performance car" just the same as your regular "successfully built a proxmox datacenter".

With health there will be many users aking on behalve of or helping out an elderly relative. I wonder whether all those 'diagnoses' and 'issues' will be correctly attributed to the right 'patient' or just be mixed together and assumed to be all about 'you'.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#287
post #65

I’m kind of torn on this. From one side, I can’t seem to trust doctors any more. I recently had a tooth removed (by the advice of two different doctors), in a claim that it will resolve my pain, which it did not, and now 3 different doctors don’t know what’s causing my pain. Most doctor advice boil down to drink some water and take a painkiller, while glancing for 15 seconds at my medical history before they dedicate…

Is it serious pain? Lasting a very specific amount of time? In one side of your face only? From zero to 10 pretty quickly?

Re: ChatGPT Health

#288

Here’s something: my chatGPT quietly assumed I had ADHD for around 9 months, up until October 2025. I don’t suffer from ADHD. I only found out through an answer that began “As you have ADHD..” I had it stop right there, and asked it to tell me exactly where it got this information; the date, the title of the chat, the exact moment it took this data on as an attribute of mine. It was unable to specify any of it, aside…

This actually highlights a big privacy problem with health AI.

Say I’m interested in some condition and want to know more about it so I ask a chatbot about it.

It decides “asking for a friend” means I actually have that condition and then silent passes that information on data brokers.

Once it’s in the broker network it’s truth.

We lack the proper infrastructure for to control our own personal data.

Hell, I bet there’s anyone alive that can even name every data broker, let alone contacts them to police what information they’re passing about.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone who used ChatGPT to diagnose themselves with a rare and specific disease. They paid out of pocket for some expensive and intrusive diagnostics that their doctor didn't want to perform and it came out, surprise, that they didn't have this disease. The faith of this person in ChatGPT remains nonetheless just as high. I'm constantly amazed at the attitude that doctors are useless and that their multiple y…

They're not useless but they're also human with limited time and limited amount of inputs. To me it's crazy that doctors rarely ask me if I'm taking any medications for example, since meds can have some pretty serious side effects. ChatGPT Health reportedly connects to Apple Health and reads the medications you're on; to me that's huge.

> To me it's crazy that doctors rarely ask me if I'm taking any medications for example, since meds can have some pretty serious side effects.

This sounds very strange to me. Every medical appointment I've ever been to has required me to fill out an intake form where I list medications I'm taking.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#290

Here’s something: my chatGPT quietly assumed I had ADHD for around 9 months, up until October 2025. I don’t suffer from ADHD. I only found out through an answer that began “As you have ADHD..” I had it stop right there, and asked it to tell me exactly where it got this information; the date, the title of the chat, the exact moment it took this data on as an attribute of mine. It was unable to specify any of it, aside…

[flagged]

I don’t think this is a fair retort. This is not being marketed towards people who have any inkling about how any of this works. The linked press release is clearly trying to get the average person jazzed up about wiring their medical history and fitness data to ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is just suppose to “work” for the lay person and it just doesn’t quite often. OpenAI is already being sued by people for stochastic parroting that ended in tragedy. In one case they’ve tried to use the rather novel affirmative defense that they’re not not liable because using ChatGPT for self-harm was against the terms of service the victim agreed to when using the service.

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