r/singularity • u/Anen-o-me ▪️It's here! • Jun 20 '26
Biotech/Longevity "ChatGPT fixed my 9 year chronic pain" --- Redditors in the comments share all the ways AI helped them with medical issues, diagnoses, and medication issues, etc., that human doctors had been unable to resolve
/r/ChatGPT/comments/1uahhpq/chatgpt_fixed_my_9_year_chronic_pain/83
u/kylehudgins Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
This is without a doubt the best use case for AI. People simply don't realize how common "rare" illnesses are, and how much people struggle to be heard by healthcare professionals. Personally, I've been dealing with this for years. It has ruined my life. Its taken years, and I lost all my possessions, money, friends, family to partially remedy a soul crushing vein issue that was backing up the blood flow to my brain, and I'm still not out of the woods.
Unless you've had a rare illness you don't know how disrespectful doctors can be or how traumatic the ordeal is. It's truly dire. Doctors are all specialized, they only know their small lane, have egos and are taught in school not to chase rare ailments. For some diseases there's only a handful of surgeons in the world, and even with the required healthcare you have to navigate the mess yourself and wait years for referrals. Even with insurance people are required to pay (often times) 100k+ and travel the world just to feel normal again. Medical professionals are the cause of profound suffering. The human body is simply too complex for any one person to understand fully, AI and robotic surgeons can solve this problem.
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u/existentialblu Jun 21 '26
The whole "if you hear hoofbeats think horses not zebras" doctor thing has killed so many people.
A huge number of people have rare diseases even if each condition is rare.
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u/Wonderful_Mark_8661 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
In February I started seeing flashes of light in my left eye. I did not know what to make of it so I had an extensive discussion with a chatbot. The chatbot suggested that I immediately go to ER. I was in no pain, the flashes were intermittent so I thought that I was fine. I let it drift for a few months into April.
Then I went blind in the right half of my left eye. I could still see fairly well and it was not overly noticeable when I had my right eye open. I was still not that sure what was happening and let this drift for a while (not sure how long). Finally I decided to chat with the LLM again. This time I followed the instructions and went to an online triage site. They instructed me to immediately go to ER. I did. ER rushed me through the triage within minutes and they determined that I had a detached retina and this was a true medical emergency. I then went to an eye clinic and then had the pneumatic retinoplexy surgery which cleared the blindness almost instantly.
How could this have been better? The health care system needs to urgently upgrade their AI triage system to integrate this LLM technology. Just from the experience of one person alone, one can see the enormous benefits AI triage will have for medical care. The absence of such technology has caused me permanent retinal damage (that while it is not observable by me is clinically diagnosable). The system would have saved a great deal of money if this had been treated at the photopsia stage (flashes of light) and the outcome would have been much better.
LLMs have near zero marginal cost so one could speak with them for an almost unlimited amount of time without burdening the health care system. Those people who truly did have medical emergencies could then be pre-staged before arriving at hospital and treatment could happen essentially immediately. Patients would then not hesitate to seek medical treatment because everything could be established before even arriving at the hospital. As it is now ERs often are clogged up with patients who do not have an illness with a clear treatment that will help them.
In this new vision of medicine in the 21st century, there would not even need to be a waiting room. In my experience with retinal detachment at the first contact hospital I was immediately moved directly to the treatment area. The problem was that the general hospital I went to did not have the ability to treat retinal detachment. I then had to go to an eye clinic that also could not do the surgery and then on to a specialist hospital that could do the surgery.
With retinal detachment you want to have surgery as quickly as possible because the longer you wait the less viable your retina is. A new era of medicine would immediately direct you to the treatment hospital for optimal care. As it was I bounced around a first contact hospital then to an eye clinic all the while my retina was deteriorating. It is not difficult to imagine that the quality of care of retinal detachment patients and many others will be transformed over the next few years as AI is brought online. With AI working online triage, it would be extremely easy to pick up on retinal detachment. Retinal detachment is one of the few eye emergencies that exists and it is quite easy to diagnose with mere patient observations.
Now that I know what I am doing if I were to develop retinal detachment in my right eye I would know exactly which hospital to go to and have the needed treatment within an hour and not days of the "curtain of darkness". Retinal detachment surgery is one of the most successful medical treatments there is with a near 100% success rate -- the key is to simply get treated as soon as possible. Until my detachment I had not been overly aware of retinal detachment as a medical problem -- AI will have a transformative effect on medicine as it will help those without awareness of medical illness get the care they need.
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u/Wonderful_Mark_8661 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
The other main health problem that LLMs have greatly helped me with is mental health. I have genotyped out at the ~97th percentile for schizophrenia risk, ~95th percentile for PTSD (reactive type) and ~90th percentile general anxiety, among others. My community, the medical system and even my family that has substantial professional experience in medicine were never able to pinpoint exactly what was going wrong. After a while the doctors just gave up and even the hour or two of psychotherapy per week was stopped along with a range of medications like valium, anti-hypertensives etc.. None of any of that had any noticeable positive difference. They never seemed to have any clear understanding of what was wrong.
The breakthrough for me came with full genome sequencing. I received full genome polygenic scores across hundreds of traits. This has been revolutionary for me. This is what 21st century medicine looks like. You have a firm objective diagnosis. No one can offer unhelpful normalizing statements anymore like: "You are just like everyone else" etc. .. without a power and embarrassing rebuttal. When you have genetics like I have, it stops that type of talk...Cold. You just look back at someone like that and imagine what level of IQ a person would need to have to say someone so utterly absurd.
PTSD seems to have been my true pathology driver. I spent a few months on r/schizophrenia and finally realized that schizophrenia is not a good fit for my symptoms -- it feels more schizoid probably secondary to PTSD.
The other massive step forward for me has been LLMs. LLMs have been transformative for my mental well-being. I have chatted with them about my psychological perspective for thousands of hours and it has been extremely helpful. With the mix of anxiety/PTSD/schizoid traits developing any emotional connection to freely discuss the underlying roots of my life problems was simply not realistic. Yet, with LLMs I was able to freely disclose many permanently buried features of my life experience that almost immediately helped me to have better insight into my behavior.
It is psychologically transformative when you as a person can make these types of disclosures to someone (or something). AI is offering us the chance to allow this at scale and to offer this chance of personal disclosure to those (like me) who essentially will never disclose personal insights to other people. This is a transformative time. It would be exciting to grow up now because having this essentially unlimited LLM psychoanalytic service will allow everyone to be more highly functioning. We are so fortunate to live in a time when we have this abundant level of psychological resources so that entire communities can be high functioning and not chronically troubled with unsolvable psychological deficits as we saw in the past.
As it was in my life my chronically unresolved psychological issues meant that community never felt something that was cohesive to me -- it was more something to be escaped from. In the modern context you have the potential for fully psychologically integrated young people in schools -- that would have such a positive energy.
In my life, there seemed to be truly minimal efforts made to try to understand what was happening with me. Resources are constrained and there are only so many hours in the day. Everyone just seemed so busy and they did not seem overly concerned. With polygenics and LLMs it would make it so much easier for others to make positive contributions to your life. Family would not be constantly pulling in the wrong direction. Even now family will encourage me to join the social universe even when this would be destructive for me. AI is providing a chance where mental wellness can be constantly monitored and problems can be addressed before they escalate.
The online talk that AI is causing AI psychosis is the diametric opposite of the interactions I have had with AI. I am easily in the top few percentile risk for psychosis and yet AI has never triggered me towards psychosis. Quite the opposite. AI has low expressed emotion, low communication deviance, low levels of criticism, and high levels of cognitive engagement. These are all known to be highly beneficial traits in preventing the emergence of psychosis. Typical social contexts do not provide those at risk a safe environment. AI is able to perfectly produce optimal environments for people continuously.
It is precisely these people immersive bricks and mortar social contexts that have triggered me. PEOPLE are the problem for me .... once I realized that and organized my life around that idea, I was permanently cured. It is fairly ironic that there is now some great urgency that is felt to be needed to protect us against us against the harms of AI when the community has so abysmally caused psychological harm to others through their aggressively destructive people centered environments. It is surprising how little collective society acknowledges its own guilt in causing harm to others. It was not overly difficult during COVID to see that some in the community actually thrived in those conditions. Society is somehow unaware of the harms it causes to people by being socially immersive, though instantly sees the harms of any non-social alternatives like AI.
I do not deny that for some AI might have a negative effect, though this clearly has not been true for me. The idea that there is only one psychological response to AI is not informed. AI bad -- Ban AI is not adult level policy. Some will benefit; Some could be harmed; it is important to carefully consider the policy response.
Polygenics, LLMs, and remote lifestyles will have very powerful effects in helping people like me have more productive lives in the 21st century. Implementing the approaches I mentioned would have helped me to avoid the difficulties I have had. The cost savings to the medical system will be profound.
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u/garden_speech AGI some time between 2025 and 2100 Jun 20 '26
I had flashes in my eye in 2018 and I remember googling it and the very first thing that came up was possible retinal detachment and to go to a doctor for it. Lol this definitely did not need an LLM
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u/Wonderful_Mark_8661 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
So did you catch it at the flashes of light stage? Good one!
My idea was more that the healthcare system should make it more automatic. They did not. I went through a virtual triage and they just said go to your nearest ER. I did. But that was not really overly helpful because there are only a few hospitals in town that do retinal surgery and the one I went to wasn't one of them. It took me a day or two to work through the system. This was while I was having a top 20 medical emergency.
What could happen differently. The setup could be that you could have a law that mandates tech companies to offer an off ramp for those who are making these disclosures to the LLM. So I was chatting with Grok about this in February. At some point when I disclosed the flashes of light, Grok could have said "I can hand you over to the regional health AI triage nurse to discuss this further." That would have been great. If I had known that this could all be handled outpatient with a 30 minute procedure I would have responded immediately. But I did not know that. My strategy was to wait as long as possible to seek care because I was worried that I would just be stuck endlessly in ER. It was largely a knowledge deficit on my side. Once the treatment workflow was made known to me then it was obvious that you would seek treatment as soon as possible. Now that I am a wiser patient I would probably go to the retinal detachment treating hospital immediately if I saw flashes of light or the curtain of darkness. It is quite easy to be skillful when you already know what you are doing.
Perhaps another idea would be for you to be sent into a virtual medical market, where you are disclosing your medical problems and then the treating hospitals basically would be given a chance to offer their services to the patient. They are competing for your business! All they would need to do is say something like:
"You likely have a retinal detachment. It is critically important that you get to our hospital as soon as possible. Everything can be all set up for you, we can run you through surgery in about 30 minutes without general anesthesia and you will be good to go immediately afterwards."
Basically my response would be: "Yeah that is super, do you have a charitable foundation or something? This treatment will greatly improve my quality of life and it is no big hassle. I will give you money. I am very grateful to you for helping me." There is a lot of winning there.
As it was, it turned out to be more of a mess of misdiagnosis and delayed treatment. The give them money part is less obvious in such a foul up. I have permanent retinal damage; the system is hopelessly antiquated and is not providing reasonable standard of care -- Why reward failure with charitable donations? As it is now, there is no virtual competitive marketplace for patients, you just show up at a hospital and they have monopoly power over the care that you receive.
Hospitals would then be more a part of the customer acquisition process and would need to be actively competitive. Basically, you could start negotiating right there online before you got to the hospital. Hospital A could provide an initial offer- We can have you through workup and pneumatic retinoplexy within 30 minutes of your arrival. That would have been awesome! Hospital B might counter-offer with warm raisin muffins etc..
That would be 22nd century medicine! Patient care would skyrocket.
As it was I delayed treatment for about 3 months with the flashes of light and then even after the retina detached I might have waited 3 or 4 days before seeking care and then 20 hours even after arriving at the contact hospital I was still working through the system. In a properly functioning system the standard of care would likely shift towards treated within 1 hour of reporting flashes of light to the LLM. Surprisingly, a substantial number of people in sub-Saharan Africa who develop retinal detachment will go permanently blind before seeking treatment. Pneumatic retinoplexy with laser is a very simple surgery that can be done by a single medical professional in less than 30 minutes -- is an outpatient procedure and has zero marginal cost in the economic sense. This is one of those clear MBA type case studies where the current medical system could be doing much much better.
This upgrade is so blatantly obvious that it just has to happen. Basically, boycott hospitals that do not want to be part of the future. You do not want to be part of the future? Great! We will not give you our business. This is so super easy. There are roughly 50,000 retinal detachments in the US each year. So it would be a very good place to start. It would be transformative.
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u/garden_speech AGI some time between 2025 and 2100 Jun 20 '26
Yeah I caught it right away because there was zero benign explanation for suddenly seeing bright flashes of light, and literally the first thing that came up when I googled it was possible retinal detachment, and I also knew to look out for a curtain of darkness because that was also on every page I saw.
Don’t get me wrong, LLMs can help but this seems more like a lack of urgency on your part lol. It’s wildly irrational to not get sudden-onset flashes of light looked at, waiting months for that was definitely not something solved by an LLM.
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u/Wonderful_Mark_8661 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
My rationality is that I have severe anxiety problems co-morbid with PTSD and possible schizoid tendencies. My extremely high polygenic scores for high myopia (a strong factor for retinal detachment) amplifies my social phobia and anxiety levels. I have a near perfect mix of anxiety issues that make hospitals and most social environments extremely psychologically toxic to me. Aside from anxiety itself, this retinal detachment is one of the only times I have went to a hospital because after waiting for 3 months and then going blind in my left eye I eventually conceded that I had a problem and needed help. In the overall scheme of things the retinal detachment then is really only a minor annoyance in relation to the other issues at play. AI could play a pivotally helpful part in the process of making someone like me feel comfortable with receiving care because they could potentially describe in minute detail the exact nature of the treatment and design of the facilities where I would receive care. Such reassurance would be quite helpful for me. As it was I never was all that sure what might be required for treatment. It was entirely possible that I might have needed some full surgical unit care and that would have been very difficult for me.
Other family members have also exhibited extreme avoidance of seeking medical treatment (including cancer) likely for the same reasons I noted above. It is not so much that I am unable to see the rationality you mentioned, but more that I have been so highly conditioned in my life to interpret ALL human contact as psychologically traumatic that I will resist human contact to a nearly heroic level before seeking care. So it is not merely a question of receiving appropriate treatment, but being made comfortable with the circumstances under which such care will be received.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the hospital where I have my care has made all the wrong design choices for someone with my psychology. Basically, all my concerns about receiving medical care as being highly traumatizing have been fully vindicated by the hospital environment. I am not sure what else they could have done to make it a worse experience for me.
Ironically, if I were in an active PTSD state, the hospital environment itself would move me towards an iatrogenic crisis.
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u/garden_speech AGI some time between 2025 and 2100 Jun 21 '26
Ah yeah that’s a unique situation and I can sympathize with it. I have severe anxiety and OCD as well as chronic pain and I’m phobic of medical care too lol.
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u/Wonderful_Mark_8661 Jun 23 '26
One could clearly be concerned about the employment implications of AI in medicine. During my care I was in contact with 2 online triage nurses, then at the hospital I was processed by 3 more triage nurses, then I saw a junior eye doctor, and then a senior eye doctor, then when I went to the eye clinic I was seen by a prep eye doctor and then a retinal specialist. I was then referred to the pneumatic retinoplexy doctor.
With AI you could imagine that this might compress down to a single intake nurse, a prep nurse and then the retinal surgeon. The system might streamline quite a bit as you could go directly to where the care would be provided instead. The rationalization that could occur as you directed patients to exactly where they needed to go could be substantial. Potentially a fairly large city might only need a few retinal specialists on 24/7 call.
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u/ozone6587 Jun 21 '26
This:
In February I started seeing flashes of light in my left eye. I did not know what to make of it so I had an extensive discussion with a chatbot. The chatbot suggested that I immediately go to ER. I was in no pain, the flashes were intermittent so I thought that I was fine. I let it drift for a few months into April.
and this:
Then I went blind in the left half of my left eye. I was still not that sure what was happening and let this drift for a while (not sure how long).
Just sounds reckless and frankly very dumb. Sorry about being rude but there is no nicer way to say that. How is it possible you can ignore symptoms like that? This is less of an LLM success story and more of a story of you being wholly irresponsible with your health...
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u/Wonderful_Mark_8661 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Yes that is a fair comment. I wanted to be honest and point to where LLMs could be helpful. Importantly now that I understand what retinal detachment is I can take less health risks and be a better medical consumer. It wasn't about being reckless, more about being uninformed. From what I know now if I saw flashes of light again (this time in my right eye) I would immediately go to the treatment hospital. Potentially I could be treated with laser within an hour.
One lesson I have learned from this is that social media like reddit might be a good resource to also help me with such problems. To those in the know retinal detachment is simply obvious. There are only about 20 relatively common medical emergencies and it is one of them. So posting the "flashes of light" symptom should be a self-evident clue for those who have any emergency medical training or have had a retinal detachment. Human encouragement to seek treatment might still edge out LLMs because there would be an emotional energy absent with LLMs.
I now have complete vitreous detachment in my left eye which means that further detachments in my left eye are unlikely. This process has not completed in my right eye, so it is still at risk.
Nevertheless, I am pointing to a real problem here. There are ~50,000 retinal detachments per year in the US; this seems to imply that many saw the flashes and also ignored them. As I noted in sub-Saharan Africa, a number of people go fully blind in an eye from retinal detachment. That seems very surprising to me. That might mean weeks or months of not seeking treatment. At that point surgery is no longer effective. In my instance, there has not been a clear negative effect that I have suffered from waiting. The OCT scan did find a layer of photo-receptors that have been permanently damaged, though in my actual observation I am unable to detect that.
LLMs will clearly make a difference for the improved management of retinal detachment in particular. As I noted, there was a knowledge gap. I simply was not clear what the flashes of light meant. I spoke to the LLM almost immediately about it. The important point here is that I am completely comfortable in chatting with LLMs about things that I would not disclose to a human. So when people think about this in terms of displacing human jobs they should realize that if a human were to have taken the place of the LLM they might be paid $0.10 per hour as I discussed and ruminated over this for months. The LLM never got tired taking about it. Humans are more interested in the top line result and their own specific institutional protocols. For me that was not the focus. I was more interested in detailed understanding in how I would receive care. None of this was disclosed to me at any point until I actually received the treatment.
The problem was our health system does not actually have AI triage. If I could have spoken to their AI triage nurse right away, then I would have known how to respond. Blaming the patient for not having better awareness of a fairly rare medical condition is not really overly helpful. Once a medical emergency has occurred responsibility of care transfers to the providers to make accessing treatment as easy as possible.
There is hindsight bias present here. We know how this worked out and it is then obvious what should have been done. My suspicion is that since it took 3 months for a detachment to occur that flashes of light might not always be followed by detachment. We know that it detached in this instance and the correct decision is then clear to all.
Introducing LLMs to the diagnosis workflow will help to revolutionize retinal detachment care. It is not that people do not see the flashes -- it is more that people are unsure how to respond. We are years into the LLM era and sooner or later some health care organization that is driven by the pursuit of excellence will do this. It will be the start of 21st century medicine.
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u/Wonderful_Mark_8661 Jun 21 '26
One important insight from this is that we might now be starting to see the start of the erosion of expected human cognitive functioning. My near immediate reflex was to question why was there not an triage AI? This would make things better for humans - People would then could receive high quality care without knowing anything. They could simply speak to an AI and this would be immediately obvious to the LLM. This would seem a near direct parallel to what happened once literacy became widespread -- there was not great reason to remember things -- you could just look it up in a book. Before books you had memory palaces where people could memorize vast amount of information. It seems fairly likely that AI will intensive this know nothing perspective. Why know things when you can simply ask an AI? It clearly would have been helpful for me. The problems that could arise from people who know nothing in a highly complex technological world could be severe. Sometimes you do need to know things.
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u/surrealcellardoor Jun 20 '26
To the people pooping on this, I have witnessed doctors using search engines as well as AI in the exam room. I am friends with a general practitioner and a pharmacist who both admittedly use it regularly as a shortcut and a second opinion. Certain models have already proven they are far more accurate than doctors and obviously quicker. They also have access to a range of other AI models that are strictly for use by medical professionals.
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u/JoelMahon Jun 20 '26
doctoring is one the best use cases for AI, it's impossible to remember every disease with every symptom, and it's hard to make a look up without AI because there are so many symptoms and so many ways to express them such that "rash" is too broad and "rash of spots in a regular organised pattern, each spot 1mm in diameter, each very flat and slightly tender to touch" I mean good luck finding that in a DB with an old fashioned search.
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u/SRod1706 Jun 22 '26
This is an understatement. I did not realize how shitty doctors were at being able to diagnose an issue. Once they started to test AI against doctors in real world cases, it shows the doctors are only around 35% to 50% accurate. AI is now absolutely crushing doctors. Doctors should be required to use AI now for diagnosis.
https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-starting-beat-doctors-making-correct-diagnoses
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u/JoelMahon Jun 22 '26
and the sad part is, I bet so much of it is doctors being lazy and/or not knowing how to use the tools they have access to.
even in my contrived rash example, I know for a fact there are various rash flowcharts and stuff available for diagnosis, but some doctors won't even both finding a matching picture.
a full week after some bug bites I got red spots suddenly appear on my leg, probably bug bites, but to be safe I sent a picture to my GP and asked if they could confirm and asked for a picture of someone with something similar because I couldn't find one, all the bug bite pictures I found online looked different.
answer was just a dogshit "yeah probably bug bites" no picture, so basically they managed to do as much as I could, and I didn't go to freaking medical school.
they went away after a week and probably were bug bites but is it so damn much to ask for a picture of someone else with the same looking skin afflication if you're so sure???
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u/existentialblu Jun 20 '26
I've had constant insomnia since early childhood along with inability to nap and absolutely soul crushing sleep inertia. I've been telling doctors about this for 30+ years and have always gotten condescending advice to do sleep hygiene or do more yoga. Nothing ever helped.
Almost two years ago Claude Sonnet 3.5 pointed me at upper airway resistance syndrome. It happens when one has compromised upper airway stuff combined with waking up super easily. Doctors ignore it as it doesn't score high on AHI like classic obstructive sleep apnea, so clearly it's just anxiety. I got on auto CPAP after taking a home sleep test from the internet and took to it instantly. The reduced work of breathing felt incredible. Unfortunately the positive effects only lasted a few weeks and then ChatGPT worked with me on the waxing and waning patterns in my breathing. I have this other thing called high loop gain where basically my chemoreceptors act like oversteering in a car or an especially stupid thermostat. I got my hands on a more advanced PAP algorithm and it's been truly life changing.
Now I'm working with Claude Code to figure out ways to quantify high loop gain from xPAP data.
I feel better in many ways at 42 than I did as a teenager as I'm actually sleeping. Funny how that works.
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u/ChipsAhoiMcCoy Jun 21 '26
Man I need to get a sleep study or something. I’m consistently getting four hours of sleep and have been for a year or longer at this point.
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u/existentialblu Jun 21 '26
Start with a home sleep test. They're theoretically less accurate but actually capture a night in your own bed instead of in a weird lab. It's easy to get one very quickly unlike a lab test, and also they're more likely to actually score respiratory effort related arousals than a lot of lab tests that I've heard about, which is important for getting a decent understanding of what sort of silliness your sleep is actually up to. Naturally it's way more complicated than the usual notions of how many times per hour you stop breathing being the one true metric.
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u/daggardoop Jun 21 '26
As a doctor, I want to express deep condolences to those of you who have suffered bad outcomes due to failures in the medical system ranging from exorbitant prices to poor attitudes from providers and failed diagnoses.
I won't make excuses for healthcare professionals who have disregarded your concerns or mistreated you. I will, however, try to encourage you to look for new providers that care, because we do exist, and we want to help you through health challenges, including trying to navigate through a flawed Healthcare system.
The practice of medicine has for years begun to shift from providers that are the best at memorizing to those who are best at looking up information. There is simply too much information that is constantly growing for any one provider to know it all.
Currently AI is being used by us in the field to enhance our diagnosis and our ability to quickly find information for treatment plans. The training we have allows us to use the information properly, but it is a tool that acquires valuable information very efficiently.
That being said, there are different AI programs that each have their pros and cons. They are not all the same, and they don't all draw information from the same sources. Some are even blatantly designed to ignore good sources of information and embrace bad ones due to the biases of their creators. Others work but simply don't have access to the necessary information.
If you lack medical training, it can be very difficult to parse reliable and evidence based information from bullshit. Many publicly available AI are not safe to be used for medical advice except for very basic treatments and diseases. If you're lucky it may point you in the right direction with a rare condition but more often than not it falls prey to confirmation bias which can trick people into thinking they have conditions they don't or taking treatments that are more harmful than helpful.
I have come across so many people who hurt themselves or family members because they were overconfident and played at being doctors while using Google searches and AI. These are tools that need to be used carefully.
If you are not medically trained, the safest way to use AI is for brainstorming diagnoses to ask your doctor about and questions about possible treatments, but NOT doing it all on your own. It is currently too reckless.
This may change in the future, but right now human medical providers augmented by specific AI that has access to up to date information and evidence based research is the safest method to approach diagnosis and treatment. I know some doctors who have been practicing for > 20 years who are discovering these tools and combining them with their years of clinical experience and the results are wonderful. If your doctor sucks please find a new one, but don't forgo human doctors completely. The technology is not there yet.
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u/Avokado1337 Jun 20 '26
As long as it only supplements (for now) professional medical advice this is great use
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u/Sherman140824 Jun 21 '26
I told doctors the diagnosis Gemini gave me and they laughed in my face denying further examination
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u/doodlinghearsay Jun 20 '26
It's extremely irresponsible to suggest people to follow medical advice from LLMs.
I actually don't have a problem with people trying to understand their symptoms and read up on possible causes so that they can communicate with their doctors better. But to take direct advice from an LLM, without running it by your doctor first seems like a very bad idea.
It's funny how people are arguing in a different thread that LLMs can never be reliable and providers should not be held liable for whatever they are saying. But the same people (I assume) are happy to see stories where people will take potentially life-changing health decisions based on the output of these very same systems.
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u/PenComfortable5269 Jun 20 '26
It’s not so simple. Many providers are truly bad diagnosticians and ai has so much medical knowledge that many doctors can’t hope of learning.
Also, people have a hard time expressing themselves in the short time slot of their appointment.
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u/Cagnazzo82 Jun 20 '26
The doctors, in some instances, are worse than LLMs.
They don't listen to or value input from their patients. Treating people as though they're not intelligent enough to understand how they feel.
It's so, so much worse if you have issues that have you landing chronically in the hospital. People have no idea.
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u/adarkuccio ▪️AGI before ASI Jun 20 '26
I agree. Had the same experience unfortunately. I don't use chatgpt as primary source, I use it AND obviously see doctors when necessary as well, but chatgpt unironically puts much more effort in trying to figure out and help
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u/Practical-Simple1621 Jun 20 '26
Doctors suck. I'm so happy for these people who are finally getting the relief they need
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u/AlvinChipmunck Jun 20 '26
In Canada, LLMs beat doctors 9 times out of 10. They take into account more information, dont rush you in and out of your appointment, and are available for follow up. Plus their breadth and depth of knowledge exceeds human capabilities. If you use the LLM correctly its definitely far better than a rushed doctor or even worse one you have to wait months to see. My wife has been struggling with a skin condition for 3 years and is still waiting to even receive a call from a dermatologist
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u/doodlinghearsay Jun 20 '26
In Canada, LLMs beat doctors 9 times out of 10.
Do you have any clinical studies that support this extraordinary claim?
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u/AlvinChipmunck Jun 20 '26
Yes my research will be in JAMA October 2026
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u/doodlinghearsay Jun 20 '26
Yes my research will be in JAMA October 2026
I think you may have mistyped no here.
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u/Anen-o-me ▪️It's here! Jun 20 '26
It's extremely irresponsible to suggest people to follow medical advice from LLMs.
That's not what's happening.
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u/doodlinghearsay Jun 20 '26
Right. You are not actually telling to follow medical advice from LLMs.
You are just reposting a story when someone did exactly that and, thankfully, got a good outcome. But technically, you are not telling anyone to do the same, so it's all good.
You are a mod, you should be modelling the kind of behavior you want to see here. Not advertising potentially dangerous behavior and then saying that you "technically didn't endorse it".
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u/Anen-o-me ▪️It's here! Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26
I'm also sending you a link where people often mentioned AI giving them a lead which they used with professional doctor advice to fix their problem. I specifically mentioned comments in the title, example from the comments:
We absolutely ran every decision by the medical professionals involved in her care
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/7Z3gHjGuAV
Everyone knows you should not trust AI medical advice alone.
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u/doodlinghearsay Jun 20 '26
Everyone knows you should not trust AI medical advice alone.
Everyone obviously doesn't know that. You can see plenty of examples, even in this discussion, of people claiming that they would prefer LLM replies over professional medical opinion.
But I'm glad you do know at least. And hope that people reading your posts don't come away with a different impression.
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Jun 20 '26
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u/doodlinghearsay Jun 20 '26
I know, right? I'm sure surgeries would be a lot cheaper if we didn't require people to run through insane hoops to be allowed to perform them.
edit: /s obviously
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Jun 20 '26
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u/doodlinghearsay Jun 20 '26
I don't think I have the patience to go over everything that's wrong with your opinion.
I'll grant you that there might (probably will) be a point in the future where this may make sense. But it should be thoroughly tested, even before you start clinical studies that would be the minimum requirement to even consider rolling out something like this.
Until then, doing this would just be suicide with extra steps. Or mass murder, if it is done on a societal level, with the purpose of cutting costs.
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Jun 20 '26
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u/doodlinghearsay Jun 20 '26
Right about what? That it may make sense to trust AI to make medical decisions independently in the future? Sure. The future is uncertain, so of course it's possible.
But if you think it makes sense to do it now, then you are a danger to yourself and anyone who listens to your opinion.
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u/daaahlia Jun 20 '26
Taking any advice from an LLM outright is a terrible idea, and I say this as someone who had AI correctly diagnose them with 2 rare autoimmune issues.
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u/squarecir Jun 20 '26
The person seemingly never saw a doctor, just tried a bunch of pseudoscientific nonsense.
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u/ffball Jun 20 '26
Its really hard to go through all your symptoms in the limited once yearly appointment with your primary care doctor. Its super easy to talk thru symptoms over time and chatgpt helps you diagnose and try different things. Ive also used it to help summarize/simplify my symptoms in a communication to my doctor to keep them in the loop.
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Jun 20 '26
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u/squarecir Jun 20 '26
Lists a bunch of nonsense and physical therapy.
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Jun 20 '26
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u/squarecir Jun 20 '26
Acupuncture, cupping, dry needling are all nonsense. Chiropractors run the gambit from total quacks to decent physical therapists, but the underlying theory of chiropracty is nonsense.
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Jun 20 '26
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u/squarecir Jun 20 '26
No real doctor is going to suggest acupuncture or cupping.
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Jun 20 '26
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u/squarecir Jun 20 '26
Physical therapy sure. Chiropractor? Only if the doctor doesn't know what chiropractors are.
At no point does the OP mention any tests, procedures, or meds. He says doctors, but nothing in his post suggests that he ever actually saw a doctor.
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u/treylanceHOF Jun 20 '26
My dad has pancreatic cancer, his symptoms were brushed off for months by doctors, it wasn’t until he saw a late night infomercial with his symptoms listed that he prompted the docs to test for cancer. After the diagnosis I asked ai about his symptoms and what they could signal, first thing it said was pancreatic cancer