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Comment by stuckinhell | Hacker News Reader

my doctor literally used some kind of official doctorgpt last week. I was flabbergasted.

I once had a doctor google webmd in front of me at an appointment. It was funny, but then I remembered how often I look stuff up at work and thought it’s a bit unrealistic to expect them to have EVERYTHING memorized. I’d rather have them double check a hunch they have instead of holding back because they’re unsure

I had this thought the other day: why do we expect an immediate diagnosis? I can't imagine giving a decent answer to any advanced question without research.

I understand appointments have a time limit, but perhaps it would be beneficial to batch process this.

You are arguing a strawman: patients unrealistically want doctors to have every fact memorised or to deliver an instant, definitive diagnosis.

What I'm really shocked about is that new AI tools are now fast enough—and regulated enough—to be used live at the point of care.

So why do I need to pay doctors as much money, when they themselves are using an off the shelf solution?

Because those off-the-shelf solutions only work for very obvious and basic cases, and you don't know what you don't know. Meaning, if you have a more complex medical situation, you wouldn't be able to tell, so you wouldn't know if the off-the-shelf solution is wrong.

Also, we still need doctors to perform physical tasks, like surgery. The doctors diagnosing stuff and the doctors performing surgery aren't different doctors, usually. When I got diagnosed with Testicular cancer, the urologist who felt my balls up and said "yeah, this ain't right" was also the one who removed the testicle. And, he wasn't the first doctor I went to - the other doctor clearly had not felt up enough balls. He said it could be X, could be Y, maybe Z. Not the urologist, he knew right away. So, I think it's more complex.

It's funny. During tax season this year, I was engaging with several "tax professionals" from H&R Block in order to answer some, hopefully elementary, questions about my tax situation. And you know what, I could never ever get a straight or clear or definitive answer from them! It was infuriating. It seemed that my business was too small or insignificant to them to bother. They missed appointments and most of their branches were closed. I believe that they're a significantly understaffed industry.

When I finally got an in-person tête-a-tête, the guy was just Googling stuff -- I mean he was not even looking on IRS.gov, just Google -- and I got so pissed I walked right out.

So ironically, the best advice I found, the best distillation of good information, was through Google's Gemini LLM. I asked Gemini many tax questions, and it was able to cogently answer them with correct terminology, and enough correct advice that I was able to navigate the IRS.gov publications and corroborate them from the horse's mouth.

So at this point I feel like engaging an LLM in particular topics is far more productive than engaging a human on the front-lines. The humans are poorly trained, underpaid, overworked, and unreliable.

H&R tax people are on minimum wage plus commission. Also, for a lot of them the work is seasonal: crazy hours for a couple months every year, then barely any work until next tax season.

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