As a kid, I had a bulls-eye rash which is the tell-tale sign of Lyme disease. My dad snapped a Polaroid since we were on a trip and couldn’t get to my pediatrician for a week. The rash cleared up before I went in. My doctor didn’t want to diagnose it as anything or write an antibiotics prescription…until my dad pulled out the photo. She then immediately wrote the antibiotics for it. The danger of under diagnosis for Lyme disease versus antibiotic resistance tilts so far towards writing the prescription that I will never understand her reasoning. Point is we knew to go in and to advocate for my own health. Doctors are fallible humans too.
I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week
81–90 of 150 posts
Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the multiple people who have reported receiving incredibly useful information after asking an LLM, when doctors were useless? Should they not have done so? Like this guy for example, was he being stupid? https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/37561550/teen-saves-life-cha... Or this guy? https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1krzu6t/chatgpt_an... Or this woman? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43171639 Thi…
> What about the multiple people who have reported receiving incredibly useful information after asking an LLM, when doctors were useless? They got lucky. This is why I wrote this blog post. I'm sure some people got lucky when an LLM managed to give them the right answer, because they go and brag about it. How many people got the wrong answer? How many of them bragged about their bad decision? This is _selection bias…
That's an easy cop out!
AI saves lives, it's selection bias.
AI gives bad advice after being asked leading questions by a user who clearly doesn't know how to use AI correctly, AI is terrible and nobody should ask it about medical stuff.
Or perhaps there's a more reasonable middle ground? "It can be very useful to ask AI medical questions, but you should not rely on it exclusively."
I'm certainly not suggesting that your story isn't a useful example of what can go wrong, but I insist that the conclusions you've reached are in fact mistaken.
The difference between your story and the stories of the people whose lives were saved by AI is that they did generally not blindly trust what the AI told them. It's not necessary to trust AI to receive helpful information, it is basically necessary to trust AI in order to hurt yourself using it.
Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you, and reading some of the takes in this thread is actually blowing my mind. I cannot believe that the top-voted comment right now is saying to not trust doctors, use an LLM to diagnose yourself and others.
You've never had "the experience". I'll share mine. Unusual severe one sided eye pain. Go to regular doctor's, explain, get told it's a "stye" and do hot compresses. Problem gets worse, I go to urgent care. Urgent care doc takes one look at me and immediately sends me to the ER saying it's severe and she can't diagnose it because she is unqualified. Go to ER, get seen by two specialists, a general practicioner and a…
> About 70% of hospital deaths are due to preventable mistakes in the hospital.
Sure sounds like an asspull stat. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence. Do you have a reference for that? Care to share?
Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How does this line up with your religious belief that doctors are infallible and should be 100% trusted? They did not say that in their comment. Replying in obvious bad faith makes your original comment even less credible than it already is.
It's an incredibly credible comment. But if you have a need to have slavish trust in authority, be it LLMs or MDs, yeah, it'll look preposterous that someone might have an independent mind and (gasp) believe their own lying eyes before a supposedly arcane, but in fact incredibly banal and fallible priesthood.
But they aren't believing their eyes, they are believing a LLM. Wanna talk about a fallible priesthood? People are becoming adepts of the babble box.
They make an argument to always "verify", but if your first source is ChatGPT, where are you verifying next? And why not go their first?
Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've never had "the experience". I'll share mine. Unusual severe one sided eye pain. Go to regular doctor's, explain, get told it's a "stye" and do hot compresses. Problem gets worse, I go to urgent care. Urgent care doc takes one look at me and immediately sends me to the ER saying it's severe and she can't diagnose it because she is unqualified. Go to ER, get seen by two specialists, a general practicioner and a…
> About 70% of hospital deaths are due to preventable mistakes in the hospital. Sure sounds like an asspull stat. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence. Do you have a reference for that? Care to share?
At the high end, it's about 4.1%
Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How does this line up with your religious belief that doctors are infallible and should be 100% trusted? They did not say that in their comment. Replying in obvious bad faith makes your original comment even less credible than it already is.
It's an incredibly credible comment. But if you have a need to have slavish trust in authority, be it LLMs or MDs, yeah, it'll look preposterous that someone might have an independent mind and (gasp) believe their own lying eyes before a supposedly arcane, but in fact incredibly banal and fallible priesthood.
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Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you, and reading some of the takes in this thread is actually blowing my mind. I cannot believe that the top-voted comment right now is saying to not trust doctors, use an LLM to diagnose yourself and others.
You've never had "the experience". I'll share mine. Unusual severe one sided eye pain. Go to regular doctor's, explain, get told it's a "stye" and do hot compresses. Problem gets worse, I go to urgent care. Urgent care doc takes one look at me and immediately sends me to the ER saying it's severe and she can't diagnose it because she is unqualified. Go to ER, get seen by two specialists, a general practicioner and a…
>About 70% of hospital deaths are due to preventable mistakes in the hospital.
It's awful that you had a bad experience, but no. Nowhere near 70% of hospital deaths are from preventable mistakes.
I would also note that in your experience, you ended up trusting a different doctor (ophthalmologist), not ChatGPT. Second opinions from other qualified professionals is a thumbs up from me.
Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an incredibly credible comment. But if you have a need to have slavish trust in authority, be it LLMs or MDs, yeah, it'll look preposterous that someone might have an independent mind and (gasp) believe their own lying eyes before a supposedly arcane, but in fact incredibly banal and fallible priesthood.
But they aren't believing their eyes, they are believing a LLM. Wanna talk about a fallible priesthood? People are becoming adepts of the babble box. They make an argument to always "verify", but if your first source is ChatGPT, where are you verifying next? And why not go their first?
If you actually slowed down and read what I wrote, you'd see that I said that people blindly believing in either LLMs or MDs are stupid (as did the OP).
And gee, what are people supposed to do when they encounter potentially unreliable information from a generic non-vetted source? The same thing you do with literally any other one:
https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/what%E2%80%99s-wrong-wi...
> If you do start with Wikipedia, you should make sure articles you read contain citations–and then go read the cited articles to check the accuracy of what you read on Wikipedia. For research papers, you should rely on the sources cited by Wikipedia authors rather than on Wikipedia itself.
> There are other sites besides Wikipedia that feature user-generated content, including Quora and Reddit. These sites may show up in your search results, especially when you type a question into Google. Keep in mind that because these sites are user-authored, they are not reliable sources of fact-checked information. If you find something you think might be useful to you on one of those sites, you should look for another source for this information.
> The fact that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic research doesn't mean that it's wrong to use basic reference materials when you're trying to familiarize yourself with a topic. In fact, the Harvard librarians can point you to specialized encyclopedias in different fields that offer introductory information. These sources can be particularly useful when you need background information or context for a topic you're writing about.
This isn't rocket science.
Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's morally wrong to trust a child's well-being to an LLM over a trained medical professional, and I feel strongly enough about this to express that here.
I agree with you, and reading some of the takes in this thread is actually blowing my mind. I cannot believe that the top-voted comment right now is saying to not trust doctors, use an LLM to diagnose yourself and others.
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Re: I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you, and reading some of the takes in this thread is actually blowing my mind. I cannot believe that the top-voted comment right now is saying to not trust doctors, use an LLM to diagnose yourself and others.
You've never had "the experience". I'll share mine. Unusual severe one sided eye pain. Go to regular doctor's, explain, get told it's a "stye" and do hot compresses. Problem gets worse, I go to urgent care. Urgent care doc takes one look at me and immediately sends me to the ER saying it's severe and she can't diagnose it because she is unqualified. Go to ER, get seen by two specialists, a general practicioner and a…
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