I'd rather not talk to a commercial LLM about personal (health) details. Guess how they will/do try to make this completely overhyped chat bots profitable. OpenAI could sell relevant personal health related data to insurance companies, or maybe the hr department of your next job. Just saying...
ChatGPT Health
381–390 of 677 posts
Re: ChatGPT Health
#382My 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…
That's a tip I recommend people to try when they are using LLMs to solve stuff. Instead of asking "how to..", ask "what alternatives are there to...". A top-k answer is way better, and you get to engage more with whatever you are trying to learn/solve.
Same if you are coding, ask "Is it possible" not "How do I" as the second one will more quickly result in hallucinations when you are asking it for something that isn't possible.
Re: ChatGPT Health
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think the majority of those people are lying or do you think it's possible that our pursuit of algorithmic consumption is actually rewiring our neural pathways into something that looks/behaves more like ADHD? Personally, I'm on the fence. I suspect that I've always had a bit of that, but anecdotally, it does seem to have gotten worse in the past decade, but perhaps it's just a symptom of old age (31 hehehe).
I have what you would call metric shittons of ADHD. Medically diagnosed. Was kicked outta university for failing grades and all. Pills saved me. If you think you have it, the best thing you can do for yourself is at least get a diagnosis done. In b4 people come in and chime it can be faked. Yes the symptoms can be faked. But why would you if you really want to know what is wrong with you if any? (Hoping you aren't a…
I really hope this doesn't get lost in the sea of comments and don't feel pressured to answer any of them but:
what would you recommend if one is against the idea of medication in general for neurological issues that aren't deterental to ones life?
do you feel the difference between being medicated and (strong?) coffee?
have you felt the effects weaken over time?
if you did drink coffee, have you noticed a difference between the medication effects weakening on the same scale as caffeine?
is making life easier with medication worth the cost over just dealing with it by naturally by adapting to it over time (if even possible in your case)?
this is a personal pet-project of observing how different people deal with ADHD.
Re: ChatGPT Health
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they pepper it with warnings and add safe guards, then I'm fine. I think they can design it to minimize misinformation or at least blind trust.
People are very good at ignoring warnings, I see it all the time. There's no way to design it to minimise misinformation, the "ground truth" problem of LLM alignment is still unsolved. The only system we currently have to allow people to verify they know what they are doing is through licencing: you go to training, you are tested that you understand the training, and you are allowed to do the dangerous thing. Are you…
There is no way to stop this at this point. Local and/or open models are capable enough that there is just a short window before attempts at restricting this kind of thing will just lead to a proliferation of services outside the reach of whichever jurisdiction decides to regulate this.
If you want working regulation for this, it will need to focus on warnings and damage mitigation, not denying access.
Re: ChatGPT Health
#385My 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…
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Re: ChatGPT Health
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's a sweeping generalization unsupported by facts. In reality you'll find the vast majority of GPs are highly intelligent and quite good at problem solving. In fact, I'd go so far as to say their training is so intensive and expansive that laypeople who make such comments are profoundly lacking in awareness on the topic. Physicians are still human, so like anything there's of course bad ones, specialists included…
Maybe they are, but for most of my interactions with GP's in recent years, and several with specialists, for anything much beyond the very basics, I've had to educate them, and it didn't require much knowledge to exceeds theirs on specific conditions.
In one case, a specialist made arguments that were trivially logically fallacious and went directly against the evidence from treatment outcomes.
In other cases, sheer stupidity of pattern matching with rational thinking seemingly totally turned off. E.g. hearing I'd had a sinus infection for a long time, and insisting that this meant it was chronic and chronic meant the solution was steroids rather than antibiotic, despite a previous course having done nothing, and despite the fact that an antibiotic course had removed most of the symptoms both indicating the opposite - in the end, after bypassing my GP at the time and explaining and begging an advance nurse practitioner, I got two more courses of antibiotic and the infection finally fully went.
I'm sure all of them could have done better, and that a lot of it is down to dysfunction, such as too little time allotted to actually look at things properly, but some of the interactions (the logical fallacy in particular) have also clearly been down to sheer ignorance.
I also expect they'd eventually get there, but doing your own reading and guiding things in the right direction can often short-circuit a lot of bullshit that might even deliver good outcomes in a cost effective way on a population level (e.g. I'm sure the guidance on chronic sinus issues is right the vast majority of time - most bacterial sinus infections either clear by themselves or are stopped early enough not to "pattern match" as chronic), but might cause you lots of misery in the meantime...
Re: ChatGPT Health
#387My 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…
I've heard a lot of such anecdotes. I'm not saying its ill-intentioned, but the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement. I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. How frequent are mis-diagnosis like this? How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcome…
> ...this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement.
So what? Am I supposed to clutch pearls and turn off my brain at the stopword now?
Re: ChatGPT Health
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing. I struggled with long-term undiagnosed issues for so long. It took me 15 years of trying with doctors until one did a colonoscopy and found an H.Pylori infection in 2018. Prescribed the right kind of antibiotics and changed my life. In hindsight, my symptoms matched many of the infection's. No doctor figured it out. So many doctors never bothered to conduct any tests. Many said it's in my head. So…
H. Pylori is like one of the most common infections there is. How did your doctors not look for that?
Programmers have the benefit of being able to torture and kill our patients at scale (unit and integration testing), doctors less so. The diagnostic skills one hits in any given doctor may be relatively shallow, plus tired, overworked, or annoyed by a patients self expression… the results I’ve seen are commonly abysmal and care providers are never shocked by poor and misdiagnosis from other practitioners.
I have some statistically very common conditions and a family medical history with explicit confirmation of inheritable genetic conditions. Yet, if I explain my problems A to Z I’m a Zebra whose female hysteria has overwhelmed his basic reasoning and relationship to reality. Explained Z to A, well I can’t get past Z because, holy crap is this an obvious Horse and there’s really only one cause of Horse-itis and if your mom was a Horse then you’re Horse enough for Chronic Horse-itis.
They don’t have time to listen, their ears aren’t all that great, and the mind behind them isn’t necessarily used to complex diagnostics with misleading superficial characteristics. Fire that through a 20 min appointment, 10 of which is typing, maybe in a second language or while in pain, 6 plus month referral cycles and… presto: “it took a decade to identify the cause of the hoof prints” is how you spent your 30s and early 40s.
Re: ChatGPT Health
#389recommending people eat horse dewormer as a service here we go
Re: ChatGPT Health
#390My 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…
I've heard a lot of such anecdotes. I'm not saying its ill-intentioned, but the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement. I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. How frequent are mis-diagnosis like this? How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcome…
The fact is that doctors are human, so they have cognitive biases and make mistakes and sometimes miss things, just like all other humans.