As you read these stories, keep in mind that there will never be an astralcodexten.com guest essay from someone who spent time trying to diagnose a health condition with AI and it didn't help or even caused some harm. And that's probably the most common experience.
Gemini 3 correctly diagnosed the cause of my skin issues that a real dermatologist failed to diagnose, despite multiple visits. I followed its advice and now the issues are completely gone.
> Strangely, there were many times where ChatGPT decided it would answer our medical question, but not in the form of a TV medical script. The tides had completely turned!
I've noticed this happens a lot with characters that don't have any long lines and/or have limited vocabulary.
Furby trails off pretty quickly, Abathur from StarCraft 2 (great for shortening code comments BTW) starts talking like a typical LLM after a few sentences.
Holy shit are you me?? I just did a little side project last week to get my Claude code agents to RP as Abathur with me. Same results for me, it works for the first couple responses, but very quickly regresses to the mean. I tried writing out a prose/voice guide, I didn’t need it to use actual Abathur quotes, but it never seems to stick. I think there’s a thing the caveman mode does that re-injects the instructions to keep it in line, I haven’t gotten around to experimenting with anything yet though.
The more time I spend with the US medical system, the more I realize that nobody cares about your health as much as you do, and you really do need to learn how to engage with it, understand what's happening, and then decode how the system works and actively advocate for your own care.
It doesn't matter how great your doctors are, you're still only going to get an hour or so of their time per month if you are REALLY lucky.
Navigating this is really hard. The more AI assistance I can get the better.
Most people don’t understand this fact. Some of us are lucky enough to have friends or family that can help us as a health advocate. There are even people who work as health advocates as a profession.
You are the only person you can truly depend on when it comes to advocating for yourself and your health. But if you know that you are not properly equipped to do that job, then you need to get yourself a good health advocate. It’s like hiring a lawyer, but for your health.
Sadly, yes — that is what our healthcare system has devolved into.
> the more I realize that nobody cares about your health as much as you do
This is going to be true in all medical systems, and really in all systems for all fields.
No one else (other than maybe your immediate family) is going to care as much about your situation as you are. Any doctor, in any system, is going to have multiple patients, and they will care about all of them. You, an individual, is going to care about your own life because it is the most important thing to you, and you aren’t splitting that amongst many different patients.
This story is written like it vindicates AI medicine but really it seems like the human medical system dropped the ball on the MRI. ChatGPT didn't have any brilliant insight, it just (eventually) suggested the same thing a human doctor had already suggested, but this time the author and his wife pushed harder for it to happen.
To use the metaphor from the article, they found the keys in the last place they looked.
The human medical system drops the ball all the time unfortunately. What I don’t understand is how they didn’t see that giant fibroid from ultrasound alone. An MRI shouldn’t have been needed. Then the doctor trying to talk them out of the MRI, I hope they were embarrassed after. So upsetting. My wife’s friend had something similar happen after 2-3 years of unsuccessful fertility treatment, then they finally realized she had endometriosis. Seems like that should have been looked into sooner.
> but this time the author and his wife pushed harder for it to happen
This is the essence of how to make the medical system work for you. Advocate for yourself. AI helps know what to ask, why you should ask, and how to get past the first few layers of dismissals.
Again, this seems more like an indictment of the American medical system than kudos for AI.
For the developers here, consider: "So our CI pipeline is super flaky, and it you have to restart it in a variety of non-intuitive ways. LLMs have been a massive breakthrough because the bot can run in an endless loop reading the confusing error messages and retrying the pipeline with different environment variables until it passes!"
Doctors don’t need brilliant insight, they need to essentially leverage human medical knowledge against unwellness in human beings. This is confounded by two measures: too many patients per doctor, and too much human medical knowledge.
this is one case. there's no proof here that AI will generally do better than human doctors. consider also that the power it has to convince people to push for better medical treatments can also be used to push for worse ones, or to halt standard treatment entirely, at which point it is much harder for the medical system to intervene as they aren't interacting with doctors.
There is some evidence that has been collected so far that, taken across large sample sizes, good AI systems are now better at diagnosing certain diseases, etc…. We started here with Mycin and e-Mycin back in the 60s. Hopefully, these systems can now start to be better integrated into modern medicine systems.
However, the real problem is that modern AI systems still hallucinate. And there is not yet any evidence that I’ve seen that AI systems can be trusted to work at these levels of efficiency and correctness at the tactical single-patient level, as opposed to the strategic population level.
> Even if you’re paying a gazillion dollars for IVF treatments, you still only get a few precious moments to talk to your doctor every visit. That’s just how the US medical system works. If you want to plumb the depths of what treatments are possible, or ask super detailed and anxiety ridden questions about every single scan from the latest round of imaging, you’re going to want a chatbot by your side.
Ehm, no. I want doctors by my side working in a system that is not meant to be producing gains for the rich investors but to help the sick and sad.
Just imagine what could be done with all those billions poured into datacenters and GPUs, if they were invested in public goods like a decent health system!
Sure, that is what we want, but I am not sure what you expected OP to do? Put his life on hold, skip trying for a baby, and dedicate his life to trying to change a system that people have been fighting to change unsuccessfully for decades?
OP is playing the cards he has been dealt, not wishing that he was playing a completely different game.
As you read these stories, keep in mind that there will never be an astralcodexten.com guest essay from someone who spent time trying to diagnose a health condition with AI and it didn't help or even caused some harm. And that's probably the most common experience.
Gemini 3 correctly diagnosed the cause of my skin issues that a real dermatologist failed to diagnose, despite multiple visits. I followed its advice and now the issues are completely gone.
What was your issue if you don't mind me asking? It's really hard to verify efficacy otherwise.
> Strangely, there were many times where ChatGPT decided it would answer our medical question, but not in the form of a TV medical script. The tides had completely turned!
I've noticed this happens a lot with characters that don't have any long lines and/or have limited vocabulary.
Furby trails off pretty quickly, Abathur from StarCraft 2 (great for shortening code comments BTW) starts talking like a typical LLM after a few sentences.
Holy shit are you me?? I just did a little side project last week to get my Claude code agents to RP as Abathur with me. Same results for me, it works for the first couple responses, but very quickly regresses to the mean. I tried writing out a prose/voice guide, I didn’t need it to use actual Abathur quotes, but it never seems to stick. I think there’s a thing the caveman mode does that re-injects the instructions to keep it in line, I haven’t gotten around to experimenting with anything yet though.
That is a useful hint, thanks!
I make Abathur rephrase multi-line comments, because every LLM out there enjoys peppering code with them.
A successful recconect resets the counter. Efficient.
Doesn't always catch that distinctive style, but at least all the fluff is gone.
This Zerg is a software engineer at heart and has no tolerance for nonsense.
Plot twist: GP _is_ you.
The more time I spend with the US medical system, the more I realize that nobody cares about your health as much as you do, and you really do need to learn how to engage with it, understand what's happening, and then decode how the system works and actively advocate for your own care.
It doesn't matter how great your doctors are, you're still only going to get an hour or so of their time per month if you are REALLY lucky.
Navigating this is really hard. The more AI assistance I can get the better.
Most people don’t understand this fact. Some of us are lucky enough to have friends or family that can help us as a health advocate. There are even people who work as health advocates as a profession.
You are the only person you can truly depend on when it comes to advocating for yourself and your health. But if you know that you are not properly equipped to do that job, then you need to get yourself a good health advocate. It’s like hiring a lawyer, but for your health.
Sadly, yes — that is what our healthcare system has devolved into.
> the more I realize that nobody cares about your health as much as you do
This is going to be true in all medical systems, and really in all systems for all fields.
No one else (other than maybe your immediate family) is going to care as much about your situation as you are. Any doctor, in any system, is going to have multiple patients, and they will care about all of them. You, an individual, is going to care about your own life because it is the most important thing to you, and you aren’t splitting that amongst many different patients.
This story is written like it vindicates AI medicine but really it seems like the human medical system dropped the ball on the MRI. ChatGPT didn't have any brilliant insight, it just (eventually) suggested the same thing a human doctor had already suggested, but this time the author and his wife pushed harder for it to happen.
To use the metaphor from the article, they found the keys in the last place they looked.
The human medical system drops the ball all the time unfortunately. What I don’t understand is how they didn’t see that giant fibroid from ultrasound alone. An MRI shouldn’t have been needed. Then the doctor trying to talk them out of the MRI, I hope they were embarrassed after. So upsetting. My wife’s friend had something similar happen after 2-3 years of unsuccessful fertility treatment, then they finally realized she had endometriosis. Seems like that should have been looked into sooner.
> but this time the author and his wife pushed harder for it to happen
This is the essence of how to make the medical system work for you. Advocate for yourself. AI helps know what to ask, why you should ask, and how to get past the first few layers of dismissals.
In this case it took roughly four years for AI to suggest a test. How should we interpret the utility of AI in this situation?
Again, this seems more like an indictment of the American medical system than kudos for AI.
For the developers here, consider: "So our CI pipeline is super flaky, and it you have to restart it in a variety of non-intuitive ways. LLMs have been a massive breakthrough because the bot can run in an endless loop reading the confusing error messages and retrying the pipeline with different environment variables until it passes!"
Doctors don’t need brilliant insight, they need to essentially leverage human medical knowledge against unwellness in human beings. This is confounded by two measures: too many patients per doctor, and too much human medical knowledge.
I mean if "AI medicine via chatbot" gets better results than the human medical system, I'd say that vindicates it..
this is one case. there's no proof here that AI will generally do better than human doctors. consider also that the power it has to convince people to push for better medical treatments can also be used to push for worse ones, or to halt standard treatment entirely, at which point it is much harder for the medical system to intervene as they aren't interacting with doctors.
There is some evidence that has been collected so far that, taken across large sample sizes, good AI systems are now better at diagnosing certain diseases, etc…. We started here with Mycin and e-Mycin back in the 60s. Hopefully, these systems can now start to be better integrated into modern medicine systems.
However, the real problem is that modern AI systems still hallucinate. And there is not yet any evidence that I’ve seen that AI systems can be trusted to work at these levels of efficiency and correctness at the tactical single-patient level, as opposed to the strategic population level.
I think lots more work needs to be done here.
> Even if you’re paying a gazillion dollars for IVF treatments, you still only get a few precious moments to talk to your doctor every visit. That’s just how the US medical system works. If you want to plumb the depths of what treatments are possible, or ask super detailed and anxiety ridden questions about every single scan from the latest round of imaging, you’re going to want a chatbot by your side.
Ehm, no. I want doctors by my side working in a system that is not meant to be producing gains for the rich investors but to help the sick and sad.
Just imagine what could be done with all those billions poured into datacenters and GPUs, if they were invested in public goods like a decent health system!
Sure, that is what we want, but I am not sure what you expected OP to do? Put his life on hold, skip trying for a baby, and dedicate his life to trying to change a system that people have been fighting to change unsuccessfully for decades?
OP is playing the cards he has been dealt, not wishing that he was playing a completely different game.