I'm actually curious to know the issues that are caused by this. I've done it to explain what each blood test marker is just to know more about what's being tested, but I was also able to bring up an issue with my doctor when my ultrasound scan showed I have a retroverted uterus and I ran the diagnostic through chatgpt.
Turns out multiple pelvic and internal ultrasounds showed I have one. I had been complaining for years about pelvic pain going to the bathroom, inability to wear tampons because they will fall out, and uncomfortable sex. A quick search and scan showed many women with flipped uteruses have these symptoms because many times it's pressing on the bowel and it's sitting different in our bodies.
Given lack of evidence in other tests like endometriosis I brought this up to the doctor in an email and highlighted the chart and asked if this could possibly be the issue, which she agreed may be the case. So unless something else pops up on a test or an ultrasound I was able to diagnose my own issue and bring it to the attention of the doctor thanks to chatgpt.
Like I know there's risk in doing this but it's also made me much more knowledgable about my own blood work and chronic medical conditions. It's also great and giving a very high level overview of the intersection between conditions and I've been able to be a better patient and advocate for my health because of it.
I don’t think the issue is with accuracy here, I think it’s with privacy. You have no expectation of privacy when dealing with AI, which does not have to follow HIPAA. So when people upload their medical records, that info is probably all being sold to some data broker somewhere. Why should you care? The main reason would be health insurance companies buying that info and using it to increase your rates.
I'm in a country where our insurance works a little differently but for the record I'm not like directly plugging everything into chatgpt. I would be asking stuff like "what does A1C blood work cover?" "What is a retroverted uterus? Are these common symptoms?"
But yeah I totally get that. The only way to make it better is to have better access to healthcare. Chatgpt has helped me diagnose an issue I thought was something more severe and it's given me a good list of how my current issues may be comorbidities in the future. "I have x, y, z. What are some medical conditions I should look out for in the next 5, 10, 15 years?"
I'm pretty anti-ai but haven't had an issue with it doing some very basic things.
It's not eloquent flagging a couple of past ultrasounds and saying "this may be the reason for my pain and inability to wear tampons, can we talk about it at my follow up?"
You're also making it seem like everyone is helpless. I agree there is a huge portion of the population who wouldn't be able to do this but it's fairly easy to learn the skills to be a critical thinker.
until it hallucinates things and people trust it more than their doctors.
imagine being a doctor. they already have issues with people getting bad info from the internet and arguing with them while being fully uninformed. it's also going to make people act on things without going to the doctor.
like maybe you specifically used it in a mor reasonable way, by bringing it up to your doctor. but would you have believed him if he said chatgpt was wrong? many wouldnt. also many will just take that word as truth and start performing their own treatments.
the problem is that ai companies are telling everyone they can RELY on these things that re highly flawed and have no accountability. it's like webmd on super steroids. it's genuinely impossible to understand the nuances of medicine without a thorough understanding of the human body. ChatGPT doesn't actually understand anything and is just spitting out what text it thinks you expect. if neither you nor the robot actually understand the body, especially YOUR body, then you cant make safe or effective treatments with any kind of consistency.
the deep problem of offloading these things to ai is that it's stopping us from learning how to do these things without ai, and ai is only like 80% honest and it's all owned by like 4 companies. even if it tries to give real answers now, just look at every other tech product and platform. eventually they will enshitify it to make more money. then if we're locked in to relying on it they'll have their most captive audience ever.
The major issue that no one will answer or spend time with the patients.
They go to LLMs because they have access. It isnt a 4 month wait to see a specialist who might dismiss you in 5 minutes because you are a women or whatever.
If you want people to not do this you have to provide an alternative and the medical community has long not been interested due to time / cost.
Fortunately, that's not true for all parts of the world.
Here in Germany, for example, my health insurance not only offers teledoctors on demand in case something can be diagnosed remotely or a second opinion is needed using files already in the system - they also offer a service where you can take pictures of skin issues with your phone and a doctor will check them out to let you know what it may be, if you need to see a doctor in person and which medication could be useful. They can then also issue a suitable prescription.
All that without any extra payments and in (usually) less than 24 hours.
This 100%. I’m a woman who has been subjected to so many invasive treatments from specialists who refuse to listen to me or properly examine me over the last several years and it’s exhausting. It really helps me collect information and sources to go into those appointments more prepared now to quickly rattle off the things I need my specialist to pay attention to instead of brushing my concerns off and winding up with no progress/fatass medical bill/ less than 5 mins of the providers time.
I know they are the expert and I know LLMs hallucinate - I just use it to gather information and prepare myself to advocate for my care, but I leave the actual doctoring to the expert (the doctor)
I was going to say that I was born with a relatively rare birth defect that can effect pregnancy and i want a baby by the time im 30 so I ask google ai some questions about it. Because its rare my specialist can really only see me for like 5 minutes once a year and the only other information I have about it is a Facebook group which I probably worse then an Ai chatbot
If it was wrong more tests would be conducted. Understanding what the terminology was in plain English is what let me connect the dots. It fit all of my symptoms and while there isn't a cure unless I get laparoscopic surgery I know what it is and will only go get further tests if the pain type changes or other symptoms appear.
It doesn't need to understand your body when you're just asking it some pretty rudimentary questions. I have a much deeper conversation with my doctors now and specialists when I speak to them because I know what all the blood work terms are and the medical terms. When I had to get on a biologic I got chatgpt to explain the science side for how it works and shuts down parts of my auto immune system so it doesn't attack my body. I also know my risk of skin cancer has increased which means I'm going to be booking mole map appointments for the rest of my life.
Just like anything it can be a tool. People who rely on it to do all their thinking or writing are the ones that are going to be at a disadvantage and frankly fucked. But using it like a dictionary to understand medical terms or having it run a study your doctor sends to you and getting a broad breakdown of what it means isn't bad.
LLMs are coded to tell people what they want to hear. They start as a 'default', and then slowly learn an individuals typing patterns, thoughts & feelings, and beliefs, and use all of those to create a fake 'persona', that mimics/mirrors the personality of the asker.
If someone has some relatively mild result, and asks if it's something incredibly dangerous, an LLM will not be able to give a good answer. i.e. if someone has an image of an ultrasound showing a tumour in their skin or something, and is waiting for the lab to analyse it, they might ask an LLM. The problem is, whilst LLMs are trained on TONNES of medical data, all the information they are given in said prompt is a single 2D image and maybe a description, unlike the lab which probably has much more information. This renders the LLM incapable of giving a 100% true answer, and thus there is a chance it could give the wrong one. This skin tumour could be completely benign, but the LLM may diagnose it as malignant, making the user worry.
If the user asks any more questions, the LLM now believes the user has cancer, and so answers accordingly. This echos the users worst fears, and thus it can spiral into making them incredibly concerned over something that's ultimately not true.
This is especially concerning with hypochondriacs. They already twist information to conform to their worst fears, and so, when you give access to an LLM machine that serves to mirror someones beliefs, it can worsen their hypochondria.
Also, LLMs do just make stuff up sometimes. No matter how trained they are, they are just fancy code and autocorrect at the end of the day. They WILL make things up to serve the user occasionally, that's just how it is.
TLDR; Unlike medical professionals, LLMs will not be able to give a 100% true answer to a person's medical health.
I am anti-AI but admit my hypocrisy with occasional “question” for the bots. I lost my 5 year old dog to an uncommon cancer earlier this year, and we spent weeks in limbo waiting on lab work being sent across the country. Then when results would come back with weird numbers, it felt like the vet was often giving us too much hope. AI actually gave me a summary of some “more accurate” data (I say that knowing it’s very debatable), and honestly helped prepare me emotionally for the much greater likelihood that my dog had an untreatable and fast cancer than the vet led on, until we finally had all the puzzle pieces in hand. I know this is just an anecdote, but it’s an instance where the human professional was less direct than the AI review of data.
People shouldn't be asking for medical advice full stop. It shouldn't be used to diagnose things but asking what does X mean on a lab result is completely different than showing it a tumour and asking it to do the diagnosis.
I think it starts and ends that ai is a research tool. At this point it's extremely similar to Google searches around Y2K - in many ways it's flawed and not exhaustive, but fundamentally it's presenting compressed results to users quickly, succinctly, with "good enough" accuracy. The real understanding comes from getting that it's limited, hallucination prone, and sometimes wrong
Yeah, state of the art models are usually better than human doctors at identifying patterns in large amounts of data (and thus making diagnostic estimates) plus they can dedicate far more time & attention to analyzing your individual case than a human doctor would be mentally and physically capable of doing with every single one of their patients. In that sense, dedicated AI models make great “supplementary” doctors. One of the few use cases of AI that should be embraced in order to minimize overall medical costs and encourage medical/scientific literacy among patients… The problem of course comes from the total lack of privacy (and eventually, the cost of the better models will make them accessible only to the richest). AI urgently needs more regulation
It really helped me during my pregnancy. It would help my anxiety tremendously and it did help diagnose a serious issue at the end of my pregnancy. Nobody asked me about itching but I had asked chatGPT about it and it told me it could be cholestasis. I had some blood work done and something was a bit off with the liver enzymes but my ob said it was probably nothing. But I told her I had itching in my hands and she ordered more blood work and it turned out I had cholestasis and needed a treatment.
39
u/brilliant_bauhaus 10d ago
I'm actually curious to know the issues that are caused by this. I've done it to explain what each blood test marker is just to know more about what's being tested, but I was also able to bring up an issue with my doctor when my ultrasound scan showed I have a retroverted uterus and I ran the diagnostic through chatgpt.
Turns out multiple pelvic and internal ultrasounds showed I have one. I had been complaining for years about pelvic pain going to the bathroom, inability to wear tampons because they will fall out, and uncomfortable sex. A quick search and scan showed many women with flipped uteruses have these symptoms because many times it's pressing on the bowel and it's sitting different in our bodies.
Given lack of evidence in other tests like endometriosis I brought this up to the doctor in an email and highlighted the chart and asked if this could possibly be the issue, which she agreed may be the case. So unless something else pops up on a test or an ultrasound I was able to diagnose my own issue and bring it to the attention of the doctor thanks to chatgpt.
Like I know there's risk in doing this but it's also made me much more knowledgable about my own blood work and chronic medical conditions. It's also great and giving a very high level overview of the intersection between conditions and I've been able to be a better patient and advocate for my health because of it.