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Comment by changoplatanero | Hacker News Reader

If you use chatgpt somehow saves you from making one trip to the doctor in your car it can offset the entire year worth of chatgpt usage in terms of co2 impact.

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if your use of chatgpt saves you from a trip to the doctor I would be very concerned

Most doctor visits are for benign matters...

The point of the doctorate is for them to make that determination.

More constructively, the middle ground of asking a doctor about some minor symptoms over async messaging or tele-appointments (whatever the term for those is), is probably always something to consider for the trivial stuff.

My partner works in emergency. Someone came in with a blister on their finger yesterday. They had to see the patient and send them home with a bandaid. Not a good use of resources.

There is no need to nitpick obvious comments. If you have a running nose and fever in winter, it's 99.99% a cold and a doctor visit will do nothing to help you, yet millions of people waste doctors time for that

Yes and no, you really don't need a deep expertise to diagnose the very common illness.

And that's where chatgpt is doing great.

Early days, but not as crazy as it sounds: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

"The LLM alone scored 16 percentage points (95% CI, 2-30 percentage points; P = .03) higher than the conventional resources group."

Would be much more interesting if this ranked based on severity of misdiagnosis. An LLM that is 50% better at diagnosing a common cold but missed sepsis 10% more often would not be an overall improvement.

ChatGPT is probably adequate to provide a slightly more user-friendly but also slight-less-reliable replacement for a reliable consumer-oriented medical reference book or website for the task of determining whether self-care without seeing a doctor or seeing a doctor is appropriate for symptoms not obviously posing an immediate emergency.

If ChatGPT somehow makes you eat more burgers it could make it makes water consumption worse.

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