If you want to be a doctor, go to medical school. Otherwise talk to someone who did.
If you've seen multiple doctors, specialists, etc over the span of years and they're all stumped or being dismissive of your symptoms, then the only way to get to the bottom of it may be to take matters into your own hands. Specifically this would look like:
- carefully experimenting with your living systems, lifestyle, habits, etc. best if there are at least occasional check-ins with a professional. This requires discipline and can be hard to do well, but also sometimes discovers the best solutions. (Lifestyle change solves problem instead of a lifetime of suffering or dependency on speculative pharmaceuticals)
- doing thoughtful, emotionally detached research (reading published papers slowly over a long time, e.g. weeks, months) also very hard, but sometimes you can discover things doctors didn't consider. The key is to be patient and stay curious to avoid an emotional rollercoaster and wasting doctor time. Not everyone is capable of this.
- going out of your way to gather data about your health (logging what you eat, what you do, stress levels, etc. test home for mold, check vitals, heart rate variability, etc.)
- presenting any data you gathered and research you discovered that you think may be relevant to a doctor for interpretation
Again, I want to emphasize that taking your health matters into your own hands like this only makes sense to do after multiple professionals were unhelpful AND if you're capable of doing so responsibly.
He basically said, "I'm not worried yet. But I would never recommend someone do that. If you have health insurance, that's what you pay for, not for Google to tell you you're just fine, you really don't have cancer."
Thinking about a search engine telling me I don't have cancer was enough to scare the bejesus out me that I swung in the completely opposite direction and for several years became a hypochondriac.
This was also fodder for a lot of stand up comedians. "Google told me I either have the flu, or Ebola, it could go either way, I don't know."
Except the author did it wrong. You don't just ignore a huge rash that every online resource will say is lyme disease. If you really want to trust an LLM, at least prompt it a few different ways.
My flareups and their accompanying setbacks have been greatly reduced because I keep a megathread chat going with Gemini. I have pasted in a symptom diary, all my medications, and I check any alterations to my food or drink with it before they go anywhere near my mouth. I have thus avoided foods that are high FODMAP, slow digesting, or surprisingly high in fat or acidity.
This has really helped. I am trying to maintain my calories, so advice like “don’t risk X, increase Y instead” is immediate and actionable.
The presumption that asking a LLM is never a good choice assumes a health service where you can always get a doctor or dietician on the other end of the phone. In the UK, consultations with either for something non-urgent can take weeks, which is why people are usually pushed towards either asking a Pharmacist or going to the local Emergency department (which is often not so local these days).
So the _real_ choice is between the LLM and my best guess. And I haven’t ingested the open web, plus countless medical studies and journals.
I would always prefer a doctor’s advice over consulting an LLM. However, if I was stuck in Antarctica with no ability to consult a doctor, I would definitely use an LLM. The problem is there are people in society that are effectively isolated from medical care (cost, access, etc) so they might as well be in Antarctica, as far as medical care is concerned.
It's anything beyond that which I think needs medical attention.
If I had some weird symptoms that I didn't understand, or even well known warning signs for something, I'd go to a doctor. What is Google going to tell me that I can trust or even evaluate? I don't know anything about internal medicine, I'll ask someone who studied it for 8 years and works in the field professionally.
if you can afford that, many can’t