I pity the doctors who will now have to deal with such self-diagnosed "patients". Wonder if General Medicine doctors will see a drop in patient, as AI convinces you to see a specialist with its diagnosis?
> researchers found that searching symptoms online modestly boosted patients’ ability to accurately diagnose health issues without increasing their anxiety or misleading them to seek care inappropriately [...] the results of this survey study challenge the common belief among clinicians and policy-makers that using the Internet to search for health information is harmful. [0]
For example, "man Googles rash, discovers he has one-in-a-million rare disease" [1].
> Ian Stedman says medical professionals shouldn't dismiss patients who go looking for answers outside the doctor's office - even if they resort to 'Dr. Google.'
> "Whenever I hear a doctor or nurse complain about someone coming in trying to diagnose themselves, it boils my blood. Because I think, I don't know if I'd be dead if I didn't diagnose myself. You can't expect one person to know it all, so I think you have to empower the patient."
If there's a reasonable audit trail for the doctor to verify that valid differential reasoning was done that they can quickly verify, there's relatively few downsides and lots of upsides for them.
Some physicians are absolutely useless and sometimes worse than not receiving any treatment at all. Medicine is dynamic and changes all the time. Some doctors refuse to move forward.
When I was younger I've had a sports injury. I was misdiagnosed for months until I did my own research and had the issue fixed with a surgery.
I have many more stories of doctors being straight up wrong about basics too.
I see physicians in a major metro area at some of the best hospital networks in the US.
I sadly have to agree with you. I had a 30+ year orthopedic surgeon confidently tell me my ACL wasn't torn.
Two years later when I got it fixed the new surgeon said there was nothing left of the old one on the MRI so it must have been torn 1.5-2+ years ago.
On the other hand, to be fair to doctors, I had a phase of looking into supplements and learned the hard lesson that you really need to dig into the research or find a very trusted source to have any idea of what's real because I definitely thought for a bit a few were useful that were definitely not :)
And also to be fair to doctors I have family members who are the "never wrong" types and are always talking about whatever doctor of the day is wrong about what they need.
My current opinion is using LLMs for this, in regards to it informing or misinforming, is no different than most other things. For some people this will be valuable and potentially dramatically help them, and for others it might serve to send them further down roads of misinformation / conspiracies.
I guess I ultimately think this is a good thing because people capable of informing themselves will be able to do so more effectively and, sadly, the other folks are (realistically) probably a lost cause but at the very least we need to do better educating our children in critical thinking and being ok with being wrong.
I have been misdiagnosed and taken wrong medicine for 4 years for a problem by a top specialist, the doctor kept making up reasons on why I'm not getting better.
By luck I consulted with another specialist due the former doctor not being available at and odd time, and some re-tests help determine that I need a different class of medicines. I was better within months.
4 years of wrong medicines and over confidence from a leading doctor. Now I have a tool to double check what doctor has recommended.
I usually look up my symptoms (not on ChatGPT) and when I finally go to a doctor I just let them do their job, but I usually do it just to have some idea of what's going on by the time I go there. My wife's a nurse (not a Doctor) so sometimes she can tell me if what I read sounds crazy or what have you based on her own personal experience with patients.
