I have had some incredible medical advice from ChatGPT. It has saved me from small mystery issues, like a rash on my face. Small enough issues that I probably wouldn't have bothered to go into a doctor. BUT it also failed to diagnose me with a medical issue that ended up with a trip to the ER and emergency surgery.

A few weeks before the ER, I was having stomach pain. I went to the doctor with theories from ChatGPT in hand, they checked me for those things and then didn't check me for what ended up being a pretty obvious issue. What's interesting is that I mentioned to the doctor that I used ChatGPT and that the doctor even seemed to value that opinion and did not consider other options (and what it ultimately ended up being was rare but really obvious in retrospect, I think most doctors would have checked for it). I do feel I actually biased the first doctors opinion with my "research."

> I do feel I actually biased the first doctors opinion with my "research."

It may feel easy to say doctors should just consider all the options. But telling them an option is worse than just biasing their thinking; they are going to interpret that as information about your symptoms.

If you feel pain in your abdomen but are only talking about your appendix, they are rightfully going to think the pain is in the region of your appendix. They are not going to treat you like you have kidney pain. How could they? If they have to treat all of your descriptions as all the things that you could be relating them to, then that information is practically useless.

> I do feel I actually biased the first doctors opinion with my "research."

This has been a big problem in medicine since the early days of WebMD: Each appointment has a limited time due to the limited supply of doctors and high demand for appointments.

When someone arrives with their own research, the doctor has to make a choice: Do they work with what the patient brought and try to confirm or rule it out, or do they try to walk back their research and start from the beginning?

When doctors appear to disregard the research patients arrive with many patients get very angry. It leads to negative reviews or even formal complaints being filed (usually from encouragement from some Facebook group or TikTok community they were in). There might even be bigger problems if the patient turns out to be correct and the doctor did not embrace the research, which can prompt lawsuits.

So many doctors will err on the side of focusing on patient-provided theories first. Given the finite time available to see each patient (with waiting lists already extending months out in some places) this can crowd out time for getting a big picture discussion through the doctor's own diagnostic process.

When I visit a doctor I try to ground myself to starting with symptoms first and try to avoid biasing toward my thoughts about what it might be. Only if the conversation is going nowhere do I bring out my research, and then only as questions rather than suggestions. This seems to be more helpful than what I did when I was younger, which is research everything for hours and then show up with an idea that I wanted them to confirm or disprove.

> what it ultimately ended up being was rare but really obvious in retrospect, I think most doctors would have checked for it

I'm not so sure. Doctors are trained to check for the most common things that explain the symptoms. "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras" is a saying that is often heard in medicine.

ChatGPT was trained on the same medical textbooks and research papers that doctors are.

This is ultimately the same difference between a search engine and a professional. 10 years before this, Googling the symptoms was a thing.

I have a family member who had a "rare but obvious" one but it took 5 doctors to get to the diagnosis. What we really need to see are attempts to blind studies and real statistical rigor. It's funny to paint a tunnel on a canvas and get a Tesla to drive into it, but there's a reason studies (and the more blind the better) are the standard.

The real story hear your doctor actually listened to you. I appreciate what a lot doctors do, but majority of them fucking irritating and don’t even listen your issues, I’m glad we have AI and less reliant on them.

Personally, I think the value in ChatGPT in health is not that it's right or wrong but that it encourages you to take an active role in your health and more importantly to try things. I've gone through similar issues with ChatGPT where it's convinced me that if A is true, therefore so must B though that may not be the case.

In the future, I think I'll likely review things with ChatGPT and have an opinion and treat the doctor like a ChatGPT session as well--this is opposed to leading the doctor to what I believe I should be doing. I was dismissive about the doctor's advice because it seemed so obvious but more and more, I feel that most of our issues are caused by habitual, daily mistakes--little things that take hold seasonally or over periods of stress that appear like chronic health issues. At least for me.

We have the same kind of issue as software engineers. Users come to use with solutions to their problems and want us to implement the solution. At that point the lazy path would be to just do that. If you have bad management, software engineers might even be punished for questioning the customers.

What you want instead is that the users just describe their problem, as unbiased as possible and with enough detail and then let the expert come up with an appropriate solution that solves the problem.

I try to do that as well when going to the doctor.

You should've let the doctor do its job. if he reached a different conclusion then you can tell him what you researched. and he will make a decision having already done his own research without biasing him

Which is exactly why the AI, at least the ones of today, should never be used beyond the level of (trusted or not) advisor. Yet not only many CxOs and boards, but even certain governments which shall not be named, are stubbornly trying, for cost or whatever other reasons, to throw entire populations (employees or nations) under the AI bus. And I sincerely don't believe anything short of an uprising will be able to stop them. Change my mind.