Not advocating for AI medical care, but just to shed light on why so many people use it.
Medical gaslighting is a serious issue especially if you’re either young, female, a PoC, have chronic illness, LGBTQ, struggling with addiction, a non-native speaker, etc.
I’m speaking as someone who has been denied care by doctors for an issue that would have killed me if I had not insisted on it and looked up the symptoms myself. Doctors are human, and humans have all sorts of implicit biases even if they’re not straight up racist or sexist. I’ve had a nurse get upset at me and ‘accidentally’ jab me really hard after asking for accomodations for an injection due to chronic pain.
There is a massive gap in healthcare that millions of people are slipping through. Googling symptoms is not easy when you have a dozen things going on, and for diseased with a wide range of presentations. The reason why people are using AI in the place of medical care, is in large due to the lack of universal healthcare in the US, the prevalence of medical gaslighting, the global rise of chronic illness and types of cancer in progressively younger people, the rise in awareness of mental health issues, etc.
If you’re wondering why older people are even more susceptible to this, it’s in part because doctors used to be even more prejudiced, even more illnesses went undiagnosed, old people simply accumulate more health issues over time, and many are finding solace in a tool that was able to diagnose them in 30 seconds when it may have taken them decades of suffering before a doctor even gave a shit.
I’m not saying that AI in medicine is a suitable replacement for a real doctor. But it gives patients more agency that is frequently taken away by doctors who do not treat them as a reliable witness to their own body and denies that their symptoms are real. If you have not had this happen to you yet, good for you. Once you do, you can never go back to looking at doctors the same way again and take their word at face value.
Your argument would be good, if LLMs got it right. But they will just as happily inform you that drinking your own urine is good for you, if you ask them in the right way. A doctor will always tell you no. An LLM will inform you about the dangers of vaccines and how there are many sources that say they give you autism, whereas a doctor won’t.
Getting validation from the lying machine is not a way to do healthcare. The LLM confirming that you have some condition will not change anything, just like me and my forum buddies all self-diagnosing autism, and ADD doesn’t actually help and actually causes a lot of harm.
To add to your points, LLMs are also not free of biases that the poster above and others have to deal with. The same medical biases are more than likely part of the training data used to develop these LLM. Medical biases are just now being fully understood so that data is no where near as prevalent as the sea of historical biased data.
Also, annoyingly, most people are absolutely shit at identifying bias, on both sides of the argument.
Personal example: when I went to the doctor with a painful lower back, and a weirdly pulling muscle above my ass, he said it was very likely due to my weight.
Well, that was obviously fucking bullshit weight bias, and he wasn’t taking me seriously because I’m a woman. Besides, I have PCOS, so I can’t help it.
Except when I lost the weight, the pain went away. And so did the sore knees, and the shortness of breath I didn’t even notice I had. And the PCOS complaints got much better. So… Yeah, it wasn’t a biased doctor, the guy was entirely correct, I just didn’t like the answer.
And at other times, medical science is just straight up wrong, and we found out after it improved. I had some amazing semi-permanent birth control implants, that unfortunately turned out to occasionally rip your insides to shreds. Whoops. So I got them removed, which sucked ass. Was that bias? Or just medical science advancing?
do you think that an LLM trained by the same doctors is going to do any better? and that assumes the doctors doing the training are… you know… actually doctors, and actually not biased by politics.
Not advocating for AI medical care, but just to shed light on why so many people use it.
Medical gaslighting is a serious issue especially if you’re either young, female, a PoC, have chronic illness, LGBTQ, struggling with addiction, a non-native speaker, etc.
I’m speaking as someone who has been denied care by doctors for an issue that would have killed me if I had not insisted on it and looked up the symptoms myself. Doctors are human, and humans have all sorts of implicit biases even if they’re not straight up racist or sexist. I’ve had a nurse get upset at me and ‘accidentally’ jab me really hard after asking for accomodations for an injection due to chronic pain.
There is a massive gap in healthcare that millions of people are slipping through. Googling symptoms is not easy when you have a dozen things going on, and for diseased with a wide range of presentations. The reason why people are using AI in the place of medical care, is in large due to the lack of universal healthcare in the US, the prevalence of medical gaslighting, the global rise of chronic illness and types of cancer in progressively younger people, the rise in awareness of mental health issues, etc.
If you’re wondering why older people are even more susceptible to this, it’s in part because doctors used to be even more prejudiced, even more illnesses went undiagnosed, old people simply accumulate more health issues over time, and many are finding solace in a tool that was able to diagnose them in 30 seconds when it may have taken them decades of suffering before a doctor even gave a shit.
I’m not saying that AI in medicine is a suitable replacement for a real doctor. But it gives patients more agency that is frequently taken away by doctors who do not treat them as a reliable witness to their own body and denies that their symptoms are real. If you have not had this happen to you yet, good for you. Once you do, you can never go back to looking at doctors the same way again and take their word at face value.
Your argument would be good, if LLMs got it right. But they will just as happily inform you that drinking your own urine is good for you, if you ask them in the right way. A doctor will always tell you no. An LLM will inform you about the dangers of vaccines and how there are many sources that say they give you autism, whereas a doctor won’t.
Getting validation from the lying machine is not a way to do healthcare. The LLM confirming that you have some condition will not change anything, just like me and my forum buddies all self-diagnosing autism, and ADD doesn’t actually help and actually causes a lot of harm.
To add to your points, LLMs are also not free of biases that the poster above and others have to deal with. The same medical biases are more than likely part of the training data used to develop these LLM. Medical biases are just now being fully understood so that data is no where near as prevalent as the sea of historical biased data.
Also, annoyingly, most people are absolutely shit at identifying bias, on both sides of the argument.
Personal example: when I went to the doctor with a painful lower back, and a weirdly pulling muscle above my ass, he said it was very likely due to my weight.
Well, that was obviously fucking bullshit weight bias, and he wasn’t taking me seriously because I’m a woman. Besides, I have PCOS, so I can’t help it.
Except when I lost the weight, the pain went away. And so did the sore knees, and the shortness of breath I didn’t even notice I had. And the PCOS complaints got much better. So… Yeah, it wasn’t a biased doctor, the guy was entirely correct, I just didn’t like the answer.
And at other times, medical science is just straight up wrong, and we found out after it improved. I had some amazing semi-permanent birth control implants, that unfortunately turned out to occasionally rip your insides to shreds. Whoops. So I got them removed, which sucked ass. Was that bias? Or just medical science advancing?
GPT, Claude etc yes, they will tell you whatever you want to hear.
But custom trained models tailored to the healthcare industry could be vastly different.
Oh so the same ones an everyday joe would have access too, got it
… Yes, if we develop these custom models that don’t exist yet and give the public access to it, that would be the case.
I appreciate you contributing to the conversation but they’re talking about things that are, not could be
I should not have been as rude as I was.
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do you think that an LLM trained by the same doctors is going to do any better? and that assumes the doctors doing the training are… you know… actually doctors, and actually not biased by politics.