Using AI chatbots for medical advice General health 

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.
 
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.
 
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