Yes, you don't rely on an LLM solely for medical advice. You use it to get orientation to look at other sources. In my friend's case, I was relaying to him what I learned when taking a similar drug, my doctor's cautions on stopping the drug, what the manufacturer says about stopping the drug, and the published dosing schedule.

I guess you're right about me having zero qualifications. I only have a lifetime of experience with treatments for the various conditions I live with and the dozens of drugs that have failed to treat these conditions. I've been forced into self-education (learning how to read the research papers and the manufacturer info sheets) just like any patient with a complex medical situation needs to do for self-advocacy. This knowledge has helped me catch doctors' prescribing mistakes. I wish I'd had the skill before one such mistake toasted my kidneys.

Would the same doctor also casually give you advice on suicide, confirm the suitability of a piece of rope, and all that? You cannot cherry pick like that.

When you talk of "answers" in the same category as humans give them, of "beings", you already are outside the realms of critical thought.

> I wish I'd had the skill before one such mistake toasted my kidneys.

I wish the people who died from bad LLM advice were still alive. Many of them had their life still ahead of them. You can't guilt me into confusing generated text with answers while ignoring all that. I also have pain and suffering in my life, one aspect of it are these attempts to devalue humans by putting probabalitities of words humans produced on the same level as them, calling them "beings" and all that. If I could remove all intellectual dishonesty from the world and have some pain in my right hand side diodes in exchange, I'd take that bullet for y'all. So I'm not impressed by this tear duct jerking.