Using a LLM for medical research is just as dangerous as Googling it. Always ask your doctors!

I don’t disagree that you should use your doctor as your primary source for medical decision making, but I also think this is kind of an unrealistic take. I should also say that I’m not an AI hype bro. I think we’re a long ways off from true functional AGI and robot doctors.

I have good insurance and have a primary care doctor with whom I have good rapport. But I can’t talk to her every time I have a medical question—it can take weeks to just get a phone call! If I manage to get an appointment, it’s a 15 minute slot, and I have to try to remember all of the relevant info as we speed through possible diagnoses.

Using an llm not for diagnosis but to shape my knowledge means that my questions are better and more pointed, and I have a baseline understanding of the terminology. They’ll steer you wrong on the fine points, but they’ll also steer you _right_ on the general stuff in a way that Dr. Google doesn’t.

One other anecdote. My daughter went to the ER earlier this year with some concerning symptoms. The first panel of doctors dismissed it as normal childhood stuff and sent her home. It took 24 hours, a second visit, and an ambulance ride to a children’s hospital to get to the real cause. Meanwhile, I gave a comprehensive description of her symptoms and history to an llm to try to get a handle on what I should be asking the doctors, and it gave me some possible diagnoses—including a very rare one that turned out to be the cause. (Kid is doing great now). I’m still gonna take my kids to the doctor when they’re sick, of course, but I’m also going to use whatever tools I can to get a better sense of how to manage our health and how to interact with the medical system.

This is the terrifying part: doctors do this too! I have an MD friend that told me she uses ChatGPT to retrieve dosing info. I asked her to please, please not do that.

your doctor can have a bad day. and or be an asshole.

In 40 years, only one of my doctors had the decency to correct his mistake after I pointed it out.

He prescribed the wrong Antibiotics, which I only knew because I did something dumb and wondered if the prescribed antibiotics cover a specific strain, which they didn't, which I knew because I asked an LLM and then superficially double-checked via trustworthy official, government sources.

He then prescribed the correct antibiotics. In all other cases where I pointed out a mistake, back in the day researched without LLMs, doctors justified their logic, sometimes siding with a colleague or "the team" before evaluating the facts themselves, instead of having an independent opinion, which, AFAIK, especially in a field like medicine, is _absolutely_ imperative.

I disagree. I'd wager that state of the art LLMs can beat out of the average doctor at diagnosis given a detailed list of symptoms, especially for conditions the doctor doesn't see on a regular basis.

Plot twist, your doctor is looking it up on WebMD themselves

Almost certainly more I would think, precisely because of magnitude errors.

The ol' "What weighs more, a pound of feathers or two pounds of bricks" trick explains this perfectly to me.

Not really: it's arguably quite a lot worse. Because you can judge the trustworthiness of the source when you follow a link from Google (e.g. I will place quite a lot of faith in pages at an .nhs.uk URL), but nobody knows exactly how that specific LLM response got generated.