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Large Language Models Are Few-Shot Health Learners

arxiv.org

41–48 of 48 posts

Re: Large Language Models Are Few-Shot Health Learners

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you waiting 3 hours? Are you going to an urgent care or ER?

Well... - I waited ~8 hours in an ER with my mother, who had horrible gut pain that turned out to be a ruptured appendix, before they finally took her in, with an urgent emergency referral from an urgent care center we visited earlier. - I waited 2 hours in a specialist's office waiting room, and I arrived on time. No explanation... - We waited about an hour and a half at the vet, in a room by ourselves with our dog.…

From the time that my appendix ruptured (after being told it was a virus and I should go home at the GP) to the time that I had my first operation of three, they waited 38 hours. This was in the UK, 5ish years ago.

Re: Large Language Models Are Few-Shot Health Learners

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you waiting 3 hours? Are you going to an urgent care or ER?

Most people cannot see a doctor for weeks. So after that it's uc or er.

You can generally get a sick visit with your PCP measured in days not weeks if you have one. Usually just a few days.

The OP wrote something about multiple ailments which implied non-emergent conditions.

Re: Large Language Models Are Few-Shot Health Learners

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you waiting 3 hours? Are you going to an urgent care or ER?

Well... - I waited ~8 hours in an ER with my mother, who had horrible gut pain that turned out to be a ruptured appendix, before they finally took her in, with an urgent emergency referral from an urgent care center we visited earlier. - I waited 2 hours in a specialist's office waiting room, and I arrived on time. No explanation... - We waited about an hour and a half at the vet, in a room by ourselves with our dog.…

ERs are designed to handle emergencies but people use them for many other reasons. From ignorance, to lack of money, to just not having a PCP. Another big one is that for low income families with government healthcare, taking your kid to the ER on Sunday afternoon with a runny nose doesn’t cost any more than waiting till Monday morning to see their pediatrician.

But the primary bottleneck at an ER is usually not a lack of physicians. It more often a lack of rooms and/or nurses because patients are being boarded there, or are just still there waiting on labs.

And Waiting 2 hours with an appointment for an office is definitely not the norm.

Re: Large Language Models Are Few-Shot Health Learners

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed it was obvious like “only a fool has himself as a lawyer.” Would you do your own code review? It’s impossible to be objective regarding your own health. It’s an ethics violation and sanctionable for physicians to do so for themselves.

Yes, I review my own code all the time. Right before commit, I read through the diff carefully. Then of course my team reviews the code further. The same approach works for my health, I MUST review and evaluate my health, it's just not reasonable to expect every single human in the world to go to a doctor every other week. If I come to suspect I have a serious illness, I take it to the next level of review - a doctor…

You’re arguing over semantics and seem to be focusing on minor ailments which is obviously not the point I was making.

Evaluating your health =/= reaching a diagnosis (or self-diagnosis). By all means, you should be conducting self-assessments and patients can absolutely diagnose/manage minor ailments. No one is suggesting you need to see a doctor for every ache, cold, fever or headache.

Part of our job in most patient encounters is providing education on when to escalate care/return for reassessment so you are clearly not expected to go to a doctor every other week.

What is dangerous is like in the rectal bleeding example I gave, one may Google their symptoms and “self-diagnose” hemorrhoids missing (consciously or subconsciously) that concurrent colon cancer is not uncommon (especially these days) and they should be seeing a doctor to assess their risk and plan further investigations.

This is a recent example that happened in a young physician whose delay in seeking care upstaged their cancer to stage IV.

> You are painting a very dogmatic, black-and-white picture that cannot include this kind of nuanced approach

Not really, I’m obviously speaking generally on a message board and not writing a position statement. I was also clearly talking in the context of potentially serious symptoms.

> Then of course my team reviews the code further.

This being the operative part of that. I would hope no one is pushing unreviewed commits to a production environment which is essentially what self-diagnosis is, except to your body.

Re: Large Language Models Are Few-Shot Health Learners

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you waiting 3 hours? Are you going to an urgent care or ER?

Most people cannot see a doctor for weeks. So after that it's uc or er.

I mean we book appointments many weeks ahead. That is to be expected.

Re: Large Language Models Are Few-Shot Health Learners

#46
post #31
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been saying this for months for deep learning in general (and now the new hype in LLMs) in high risk situations such as medical, legal and financial advice and even transportation. The only common use-case which makes sense is summarization and even then, a human expert ends up reviewing the output before post it anyway. > There are plenty of medical topics which people find embarrassing, and would prefer to -…

People take pills from known criminals , with high risk of fentanyl OD, just for fun. Yes, I think people would indeed take pills prescribed by AI, just make it a robot wearing a lab coat. Also pilots! I mean, pilots kill themselves and a planeload of people more than you think. Of course people would take black box ai that works.

The main difference is humans can be held accountable of these things, where as an AI system cannot be held accountable as it is not a human.

Accepting unchecked AI systems at scale as the future is plain fantasy in the view of regulator, especially in very high risk industries which is why it makes no sense for anyone to trust these systems without any assistance.

Re: Large Language Models Are Few-Shot Health Learners

#47
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been saying this for months for deep learning in general (and now the new hype in LLMs) in high risk situations such as medical, legal and financial advice and even transportation. The only common use-case which makes sense is summarization and even then, a human expert ends up reviewing the output before post it anyway. > There are plenty of medical topics which people find embarrassing, and would prefer to -…

At least for legal there is far more potential than just summarization. Harvey is already producing legal documents with error rates lower than humans.

> Harvey is already producing legal documents with error rates lower than humans.

It is mostly useful and safer for human legal professionals and experts since they have the expertise to check the output but risky and unsafe for those who have little to no legal knowledge.

A user who is a non-legal expert could get into serious trouble if the AI hallucinates output that is contradictory or harms them legally more than it helps them or even both. That is the evergreen risk.

Either way, someone will have to check over the AI's output for that risk and that is for legal human professionals to do, hence why those with no legal experience still trust human lawyers to pay them to check these legal documents.

Re: Large Language Models Are Few-Shot Health Learners

#48
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However useful his advice might be, Andrew Huberman isn't a doctor (of medicine). Summarizing academic research is almost entirely unrelated to the practice of medicine. Medical diagnosis and treatment are different from more typical uses of LLMs in lots of important ways.

> Summarizing academic research is almost entirely unrelated to the practice of medicine. Do you mean basic science research? Evaluating academic medical research is considered a core competency for physicians. https://www.royalcollege.ca/ca/en/canmeds/canmeds-framework/...

> Do you mean basic science research?

No, I mean actual diagnosis and treatment.

> Evaluating academic medical research is considered a core competency for physicians.

But it's a very different activity from diagnosis and treatment, which look much more like sequential decision-making and hypothesis-testing than like question-answering.

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