It’s not just unpopular, it’s dangerous.
Please people, for the love of life and health, don’t trust your medical issues to LLMs.
You’re lucky it was just mono.
Maybe find a better doctor if you feel you’re not getting good enough care…
Please people, for the love of life and health, don’t trust your medical issues to LLMs.
You’re lucky it was just mono.
Maybe find a better doctor if you feel you’re not getting good enough care…
Due to my partner's work, I live in a town of about 100,000. There is a doctor shortage - New patient intake can be months. The system hangs on with physicians' assistants. Going to a specialist often means months of waiting or hours of travel.
We are living in a degraded health system between the lack of doctors, burnout of doctors and nurses, and a private equity system buying up everything in sight and sucking out every last dollar it can.
Maybe it's better in large cities.
I’d bet that, if you live in the US, there are options for doctors within a 1-2 hour drive from you.
I drive an hour and a half to see an independent dentist I trust.
I’m lucky enough to have a decent doctor only 20 mins away.
Either way, I’d never trust my health to an automated system. Especially one which can’t be held accountable in any way.
But the article and the comment both describe situations where they talked to a physician first, went to ChatGPT to refine their understanding, and then went back to a physician. Seems like a good use of LLMs.
> Unpopular take: ChatGPT is better at diagnosing medical problems than a doctor who does a cursory evaluation.
Which is dangerous and harmful advice.
No reason to muddy the waters.
People can't know when they should/can trust an llm over a doctor. People will also misuse LLMs in the context of medical diagnosis where asking the right questions and examining the right places (and properly) can be critical.
People have biases, people can have psychosomatic symptoms, people can be easily influenced, etc.
Yes, exactly.
Doubly so when one has no medical expertise.
Unlikely, probably. ChatGPT aims to please.
There's also the risk that it recommends something that is in appropriate, but within your ability (like over-the-counter meds that shouldn't be used in your condition).
But - all this stuff happens all the time anyway. Most people don't involve a doctor until they encounter something really wrong that they don't recognize. They're more likely to mention it to someone else offhand and may take whatever recommendation they get.
Fair point. I could see a lot of people doing that.
It goes both ways. Replace "you give the AI" with "you give the doctor" and the issue "nothing is wrong" does not magically disappear. As a matter of fact, many doctors I have spoken with couldn't diagnose a thing and I wouldn't trust them.
One of them googled about the potential symptoms of the disease in front of me because he had no familiarity with it. And that's fine I guess since humans cannot know everything? But this only reinforces the point that LLMs can definitely have their place in assisting people, and their doctors, with diagnosing their health conditions.
Imagine you have a doctor who has read through literally all the medical books, documentation, research topics, experiments ... whatnot. Human of that kind does not and simply cannot exist. I think not many people understand the value and potential of LLMs, no matter how much this particular topic would be seen as sensitive or controversial.
You might not, but others would.
I mean people take random advice from the internet all the time. IIRC There was a whole craze about ingesting or injecting bleach to “cure autism” or something.
Random advice from an LLM is no better.
Even worse, maybe, since there’s not going to be a bunch of negative replies to whatever the LLM outputs.
At least LLM advice is normally quite sensible compared with a lot of the junk advice out on the internet.