Using AI chatbots for medical advice General health 

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ButterflyShoeMill42

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I find ChatGPT medical AI very useful. Put your symptoms in there and see what it says.
 
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AI chatbots may seem useful, but they are not reliable at all. They are prediction engines that predict the words most likely to come next, based on the data they've been fed (which is often very flawed). They often "hallucinate" or make things up.
 
It's been very on point for me. Diagnosed in five minutes what it took 33 doctors ten years to finally figure out.
 
ButterflyShoeMill42 said:
It's been very on point for me. Diagnosed in five minutes what it took 33 doctors ten years to finally figure out.
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Did it actually diagnose a condition that was confirmed by reputable tests and that was treatable by standard treatments for that disease/condition?

The reason I ask is that there are quite a number of questionable diagnoses that you can nevertheless find plenty of practitioners to diagnose you with, like "chronic Lyme" and "mold toxicity". I say this as someone who definitely DID have Lyme disease at some point, diagnosed by gold standard tests from a mainstream lab--but who ALSO did a LOT of gut damage by focusing way too long on Lyme treatment. I come across many who never even had the telltale symptoms I did (like arthritis of the knee) or any positive tests, yet who are diagnosed with Lyme by alternative practitioners, and hate to think that they are possibly going down the same rabbit hole without even having a good reason to do so like I did.

I don't doubt that ChatGPT may well be currently up to the level of suggesting these kind of diagnoses to people--which I don't see as a good thing (the only benefit is that it doesn't ask you to pay through the nose for the info, while most of these providers don't take insurance and therefore can leave you poor in addition to unwell). It might suggest SIBO for example, but if you read the current thread here on that, you will see many people diagnosed with SIBO even by gastroenterologists who didn't actually find a cure that way, only a rather useless label.

What would be a quite different story would be something like it diagnosing celiac disease, and that person then going on a gluten-free diet and having measurable changes in the villi of the small intestine. Or, I once read a story about a biologist who came across a family who had warning signs of long QT syndrome and advised they get checked out for it, which avoided potentially dangerous reactions to medication down the road.
 
SFBayFMT5 said:
Did it actually diagnose a condition that was confirmed by reputable tests and that was treatable by standard treatments for that disease/condition?

The reason I ask is that there are quite a number of questionable diagnoses that you can nevertheless find plenty of practitioners to diagnose you with, like "chronic Lyme" and "mold toxicity". I say this as someone who definitely DID have Lyme disease at some point, diagnosed by gold standard tests from a mainstream lab--but who ALSO did a LOT of gut damage by focusing way too long on Lyme treatment. I come across many who never even had the telltale symptoms I did (like arthritis of the knee) or any positive tests, yet who are diagnosed with Lyme by alternative practitioners, and hate to think that they are possibly going down the same rabbit hole without even having a good reason to do so like I did.

I don't doubt that ChatGPT may well be currently up to the level of suggesting these kind of diagnoses to people--which I don't see as a good thing (the only benefit is that it doesn't ask you to pay through the nose for the info, while most of these providers don't take insurance and therefore can leave you poor in addition to unwell). It might suggest SIBO for example, but if you read the current thread here on that, you will see many people diagnosed with SIBO even by gastroenterologists who didn't actually find a cure that way, only a rather useless label.

What would be a quite different story would be something like it diagnosing celiac disease, and that person then going on a gluten-free diet and having measurable changes in the villi of the small intestine. Or, I once read a story about a biologist who came across a family who had warning signs of long QT syndrome and advised they get checked out for it, which avoided potentially dangerous reactions to medication down the road.
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I put in my symptoms at the time (rigors, lesions, fainting, etc.) and my lab results at the time - ignored by doctors and diagnosed as "anxiety," and it came up with "tick born illness." It needed to ask a few more questions, like my age, where I was at the time, etc., but it took about five minutes. Yes, I know in hindsight that it was correct (it took me eight years to find the result - RMSF in this particular case), but I had never heard of RMSF and it would have been nice to have been able to ask doctors to test me for it as I was completley reliant on them for help. I now have immune dysregulation after 50+ years of fighting infections (I nearly died of Bartonella and developed seizures in my teens, along with IBS Constipation type and learned, at the time I was diagnosed with Lyme nad RSMF that it had caused my seizures, which are now gone after treatment) and it's been unbelievably helpful as a health coach. I am finally pain free, and understanding exactly what is happening to me. I know how to research studies, so if it suggests something, I go read studies that back it up. I have no doubt that it does hallucinate etc, but I find it very useful and plan to continue using it as a health coach during my recovery. I feed it in my current lab results and it explains why and how my body is changing.
 
You're lucky that you got significant improvement from treating Bartonella. I had Bartonella, but never RMSF, and the treatment for that made some things slightly better but not enough to really improve my life. The antibiotics for it though gave me recurrent C. diff, and then the FMT for that did MUCH more than the Bartonella treatment ever did.

How long after learning from the chatbot that it could be RMSF did it take you to find a doctor who would treat you?
 
I'd already treated my infections two years ago. I use the chatbot as a coach NOW to treat my immune dysregulation. I fed my THEN symptoms in NOW to see if it would have done better than the 33 Specialists I saw over eight years who said my symptoms (daily fainting, exhaustion, lesions all over my body, rigors etc) were anxiety, and it did. It now helps me understand my lab work and recovery.
 
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