Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

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Agree - most of the advice is WebMD level.

Anything outside the check list leaves them scratching their head. They’re terrible debuggers.

I had early high blood pressure since high school. Four blood pressure medications, one being a diuretic. Signs of edema.

It’s not like my condition required any complicated diagnostics. I met the checklist.

5 cardiologists 2 nephrologists in my lifetime. Nothing but more pills for treatment. Over two decades.

I had to be the one to research and then ask to see an endocrinologist because I thought it might be hyperaldosteronism. They were dismissive when I asked but reluctantly made the referral.

Yes, it was unilateral hyperaldosteronism. Had my left adrenal gland removed because of it.

And now my BP is much more stable. I still take a couple of BP drugs, but in smaller doses. And my BP is much more normal and stable.

No more wild, 3am ER visits where my BP was 200/120. And I lost about 15 lbs of water weight.

If have long lived resistant hypertension, please ask to see an endocrinologist to get screened for hyperaldosteronism.

In reality, there are few things a GP can do better than a nurse or some technician with an LLM, and the sooner that shift happens, the better for society.

It will be interesting when LLMs can do more to advance general public health more than the entire medical system in recent history.

What do you think that LLMs can do exactly? Sometimes naive technologists think of AI as some sort of magic solution. But if you look at overall healthcare system costs, very little is being spent in areas that could be easily automated with an LLM.

And for T1D specifically it would be very dangerous to put an LLM in control of something like an insulin pump considering that we don't have any way to do quality assurance to the level required. Simple, deterministic algorithms are preferred for safety critical systems because they're less likely to fail in bizarre or unpredictable ways.

When I was self diagnosing, my Google queries were simplistic.

E.g.

resistant hypertension many medications

Which led me to a couple of research articles about pheochromocytomas and a Washington Post article about someone with high blood pressure on a "bucketload of medications".

e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/04/23/high-blood-...

If the LLM can provide a sample Google-like analysis, data points that my 7 specialty doctors missed, that's an improvement.

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