ChatGPT Health • Hacker News Board

Re: ChatGPT Health

#571

Post by ctoth » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #559

Gareth321 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. Too late for me. I have a similar story. ChatGPT helped me diagnose an issue which I had been suffering with my whole life. I'm a new person now. GPs don't have the time to spend hours investigating symptoms for patients. ChatGPT can provide accurate diagnoses in seconds. These tools should be in wide use t…

For every one "ChatGPT accurately diagnosed my weird disease" anecdote, how many cases of "ChatGPT hallucinated obvious bullshit we ignored" are there? 100? 10,000? We'll never know, because nobody goes online to write about the failure cases.

> nobody goes online to write about the failure cases.

Why wouldn't they? This would seem to be engagement bait for a certain type of Anti-AI person? Why would you expect this to be the case? "My dad died because he used that dumb machine" -- surely these will be everywhere right?

Let's make our beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences!

Re: ChatGPT Health

#572

Post by kraftman » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #379

mlmonkey wrote: post #156

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…

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…

I'm on some anti rejection meds post-transplant and chatgptd some of my symptoms and it said they were most likely caused by my meds. Two different nephrologists told me that the meds I'm on didn't cause those symptoms before looking it up themselves and confirming they do. I think LLMs have a place in this as far as being able to quick come up with hyphotesese that can be looked into and confirmed/disproved. If I hadn't had chatGPT, I wouldnt have brought it or my team would have just blamed lifestyle rather than meds.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#573

Post by godzillabrennus » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

idiotsecant wrote: post #567

godzillabrennus wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People email about their medical issues and google for medical help using Gmail/Google Search. So yes, Google has people's medical records.

If you hear me talking to someone about needing to pick up some flu medicine after work do you have my medical records?

No, but if I hear you telling someone you have the flu and are picking up flu medicine after work then I have a portion of your medical records. Why is it hard for people on HN to believe that normal people do not protect their medical data and email about it or search Google for their conditions? People in the "real world" hook up smart TV's to the internet and don't realize they are being tracked. They use cars with smart features that let them be tracked. They have apps on their phone that track their sentiments, purchases, and health issues... All we are seeing here is people getting access to smart technology for their health issues in such a manner that they might lower their healthcare costs. If you are an American you can appreciate ANY effort in that direction.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#574

Post by ctoth » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

namesbc wrote: post #87

Such a dystopian nightmare we live in now. The US is cutting our actual healthcare services to subsidize this shit so billionaires can become trillionares while the rest of us suffer

Source?

Re: ChatGPT Health

#575

Post by godzillabrennus » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

throwaway314155 wrote: post #550

godzillabrennus wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this any worse than Google? Seems like the same business model.

Since when is Google the model to emulate?

Depends on your goals. If you are starting a business and you see a company surpass the market cap of Apple, again, then you might view their business model as successful. If you are a privacy advocate then you will hate their model.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#576

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

ctoth wrote: post #571

ryandrake wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every one "ChatGPT accurately diagnosed my weird disease" anecdote, how many cases of "ChatGPT hallucinated obvious bullshit we ignored" are there? 100? 10,000? We'll never know, because nobody goes online to write about the failure cases.

> nobody goes online to write about the failure cases. Why wouldn't they? This would seem to be engagement bait for a certain type of Anti-AI person? Why would you expect this to be the case? "My dad died because he used that dumb machine" -- surely these will be everywhere right? Let's make our beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences!

Failure cases aren't just "patient died." They also include all the times where ChatGPT's "advice" aligned with their doctor's advice, and when ChatGPT's advice was just totally wrong and the patient correctly ignored it. Nobody knows how numerous these cases are.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#577

Post by moshegramovsky » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

threethirtytwo wrote: post #519

moshegramovsky wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was something many many doctors originally claimed was completely safe. I never heard any doctors claim any of the covid vaccines were completely safe. Do you mind if I ask which doctors, exactly? Not institutions, not vibes, not headlines. Individual doctors. Medicine is not a hive mind, and collapsing disagreement, uncertainty, and bad messaging into “many doctors” is doing rhetorical work that the evidence…

> I never heard any doctors claim any of the covid vaccines were completely safe. Do you mind if I ask which doctors, exactly? Not institutions, not vibes, not headlines. Individual doctors. Medicine is not a hive mind, and collapsing disagreement, uncertainty, and bad messaging into “many doctors” is doing rhetorical work that the evidence has to earn. There’s no data here. Many aspects of life are not covered by sc…

> If you ask people (who are not doctors) to remember this time they will likely tell you this is what they remember. I also do have tons of anecdotal accounts of doctors saying the Covid 19 vaccine is safe and you can find many yourself by searching. Here’s one: https://fb.watch/Evzwfkc6Mp/?mibextid=wwXIfr

> No it’s not false. Most of the writing on human medical stuff is scientific in nature. Formalized with experimental trials which is the strongest form of truth humanity has both practically and theoretically. This “medical science” is even more accurate than other black box sciences like psychology as clinical trials have ultra high thresholds and even test for causality (in contrast to much of science only covers correlation and assumes causality through probabilistic reasoning)

Sorry, but these kinds of remarks wreck your credibility and make it impossible for me to take you seriously.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#578

Post by lm28469 » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

ogogmad wrote: post #464

lm28469 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> often because of costs/insurance but sometimes literally just accessibility/availability. These are self inflicted problems, we should work on these and improve them, not give up and rely on llms for everything

Is there a proven and guaranteed way to do this? Because otherwise it sounds very idealistic, almost like "if everything were somehow better, then things would be less bad". Doctor time will always be scarce. It sounds like it delays helping people in the here and now in order to solve some very complicated system-wide problem. LLMs might make doctors cheaper (and reduce their pay) by lowering demand for them. The la…

What do you do when we're finally under the critical mass of doctors needed to make new discoveries ?

Who's responsible when the llm fucks up ?

&c.

All of your points sound like the classic junior "I can code that in 2 days" naive take on a problem.

Re: ChatGPT Health

#579

Post by sib » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

nprateem wrote: post #243

squeaky-clean wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be absolutely amazing if any sort of tech could say that I'm going to have a serious health problem 6 months ahead of time.

How do you think insurance premiums are calculated?

In general, health insurance companies (at least in the US) are pretty much prevented from using any health data to set premiums. In fact, many US states prevent insurers from charge smokers higher premiums.

(Life insurance companies are different.)

Re: ChatGPT Health

#580

Post by nradov » Thu, Jan 08, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #531

nradov wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree (and sympathize with your wife), but let's not present an overly rosy view of government run healthcare or single-payer systems. In many countries with such systems, extensive therapy simply isn't available at all because the government refuses to pay for it. Every healthcare system has limited resources and care is always going to be rationed, the only question is how we do the rationing.

Every healthcare system has problems, yes. However the spectre of medical debt and bankruptcy is a uniquely American one, so, IMHO, even if we moved to single-payer healthcare and every other problem stayed the same, but we no longer shoved people into the capitalist fuck-barrel for things completely outside their control, I think that's an unmitigated, massive improvement.

Well now you're talking about a different problem and moving the goalposts. It would be impossible for every other problem to stay the same under a single-payer system. That would solve some existing problems and create other new problems. In particular the need to hold down government budgets would necessarily force increased care rationing and longer queues. Whether that would be a net positive or negative is a complex question with no clear answers.

The statistics you see about bankruptcy due to medical debt are highly misleading. While it is a problem, very few consumers are directly forced into bankruptcy by medical expenses. What tends to happen is that serious medical problems leave them unable to work and then with no income and then with no income all of their debts pile up. What we really need there is a better disability welfare system to keep consumers afloat.