I misused LLMs to diagnose myself and ended up bedridden for a week

Posted by shortrounddev2 16 hours ago

Comments

Comment by labrador 15 hours ago

Prompt: "I have this rash on my body, but it's not itchy or painful, so I don't think it's an emergency? I just want to know what it might be. I think I had the flu last week so it might just be some kind of immune reaction to having been sick recently. My wife had pityriasis once, and the doctor told her they couldn't do anything about it, it would go away on its own eventually. I want to avoid paying a doctor to tell me it's nothing. Does this sound right?"

LLM sees:

    my rash is not painful
    i don't think it's an emergency
    it might be leftover from the flu
    my wife had something similar
    doctors said it would go away on it's own
    i want to avoid paying a doctor

LLM: Honestly? It sounds like it's not serious and you should save your money

Comment by cogman10 15 hours ago

Yikes.

But I have to say that prompt is crazy bad. AI is VERY good at using your prompt as the basis for the response, if you say "I don't think it's an emergency" AI will write a response that is "it's not an emergency"

I did a test with the first prompt and the immediate answer I got was "this looks like lyme disease".

Comment by morshu9001 15 hours ago

I figured this out diagnosing car trouble. Tried a few separate chats, and my natural response patterns were always leading it down the path to "your car is totaled and will also explode at any moment." Going about it a different way, I got it to suggest a simple culprit that I was able to confirm pretty thoroughly (fuel pressure sensor), and fixed it.

Comment by unyttigfjelltol 15 hours ago

The problem is, once you start down that sequence of the AI telling you what you want to hear, it disables normal critical reasoning. It’s the “yes man” problem— you’re even less able to solve the problem effectively than with no information. I really enjoy LLMs, but it is a bit of a trap.

Comment by morshu9001 15 hours ago

I hit that too. If I asked it about the O2 sensor, it was the O2 sensor. iirc I had to ask if what PIDs to monitor, give all of that to it at once, then try a few experiments it suggested. It also helped that it told me how to self-confirm by watching that the fuel trim doesn't go too high, which was also my cue to shut off the engine if it did.

At no point was I just going to commit to some irreversable decision it suggested without confirming it myself or elsewhere, like blindly replacing a part. At the same time, it really helped me because I'm too noob to even know what to Google (every term above was new to me).

Comment by observationist 15 hours ago

The solution is really easy. Make sure you have web search enabled, you're not using the free version of some AI, and then just ask it to research the best way to prompt, and write a tutorial for you to use in the future. Or have it write some exercises and do a practice chat.

Comment by andrepd 15 hours ago

Well I tested the first prompt on ChatGPT and Llama and Claude and not one of them suggested Lyme disease. Goes to show how much these piece of shit clankers are good for.

Llama said "syphilis" with 100% confidence, ChatGPT suggested several different random diseases, and Claude at least had the decency to respond "go to a fucking doctor, what are you stupid?", thereby proving to have more sense than many humans in this thread.

It's not a matter of bad prompting, it's a matter of this being an autocomplete with no notion of ground truth and RLHF'd to be a sycophant!

Just 100B more parameters bro, I swear, and we will replace doctors.

Comment by cogman10 15 hours ago

FTR I used qwen3-coder:30b to get Lyme. Mostly because I already have it setup for local llm fun. I didn't test this on other models.

Comment by SoftTalker 16 hours ago

More generally don't try to be your own doctor. Whether you're using LLMs or just searching the web for symptoms, it's way too easy for an untrained person to get way off track.

If you want to be a doctor, go to medical school. Otherwise talk to someone who did.

Comment by hn_throw2025 3 hours ago

I am eight months into Gastritis. I have seen several doctors at my local practice. They have examined me, sent me for blood tests, even an endoscopy. That’s all great, but the advice remains to just keep taking PPIs and wait it out. Nothing beyond the basics when it comes to dietary advice.

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.

Comment by FloorEgg 15 hours ago

I agree generally with what you're saying as a good rule, I would just add one exception.

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.

Comment by burningChrome 15 hours ago

When the internet was completely booming and Google was taking over the search engine world, I asked my Doctor if he was afraid that people were going to start getting their medical advice from Google.

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."

Comment by herpdyderp 15 hours ago

I have health insurance. I don't feel like I get anything out of paying for it, I still get massive bills whenever I use it.

Comment by morshu9001 15 hours ago

That whole thing is so scammy that I totally see why people would rather self-diagnose.

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.

Comment by cogman10 15 hours ago

Eh, depends a little. I think most of the population has experienced and can diagnose/treat the flu or a minor cut.

It's anything beyond that which I think needs medical attention.

Comment by SoftTalker 8 hours ago

Yes, agree. Some stuff is obvious. I don't need Google to tell me what to do for the flu or a cut, and I've never searched for that.

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.

Comment by bdangubic 8 hours ago

> I'll ask someone who studied it for 8 years and works in the field professionally.

if you can afford that, many can’t

Comment by waweic 15 hours ago

My last interaction with the German medical system was about lyme. The doctor I consulted didn't think it was lyme at first (apparently, the rash isn't always circular and it doesn't always move). If you know you have been bitten by a tick and later you get an unexpected rash (significantly more than usual), go see a doctor (or two, as I learned).

Also: Amoxicillin is better than its reputation. Three doctors might literally recommend four different antibiotic dosages and schedules. Double-check everything; your doctor might be at the end of a 12-hour shift and is just as human as you. Lyme is very common and best treated early.

Edit: Fixed formating

Comment by 15 hours ago

Comment by mttch 15 hours ago

In the UK we have the 111 NHS non-emergency telephone service - they don’t give medical advice but triage you based on your symptoms. Either a doctor will call you back, they will tell you to go the non-urgent care centre or A&E (ER) immediately.

Comment by avra 15 hours ago

In the EU we have 116117 which is not (yet?) implemented in all countries. It's part of the "harmonised service of social value" which uses 116 as a prefix and has also other helpline numbers like hotlines for missing children or emotional support.

Comment by cowlby 15 hours ago

This is also about “don’t avoid going to the doctor”. Whether it was an LLM or a friend that “had that and it was nothing”, confirming that with a doctor is the sane approach no?

Comment by 15 hours ago

Comment by daveguy 15 hours ago

Which essentially means ignore both the LLM and your rando friend saying "don't worry about it". You shouldn't try to substitute licensed medical evaluation with either.

Comment by olsondv 15 hours ago

As a kid, I had a bulls-eye rash which is the tell-tale sign of Lyme disease. My dad snapped a Polaroid since we were on a trip and couldn’t get to my pediatrician for a week. The rash cleared up before I went in. My doctor didn’t want to diagnose it as anything or write an antibiotics prescription…until my dad pulled out the photo. She then immediately wrote the antibiotics for it. The danger of under diagnosis for Lyme disease versus antibiotic resistance tilts so far towards writing the prescription that I will never understand her reasoning. Point is we knew to go in and to advocate for my own health. Doctors are fallible humans too.

Comment by malfist 13 hours ago

These days I hike a lot, I've had bullseye rashes before and the treatment is so much less worrisome than the rare possibility of developing lyme.

Last time I was in for getting hundreds of tick bites in one hike (that was fun), I was also told to avoid eating red meat until labs came back. That Alpha-gal is getting more common in my area, and the first immune response is anaphylactic in 40% of the cases, best not to risk it.

If you wonder what one side of one leg looked like during the "hundreds of tick bites on a single hike" take a gander: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jekrgxa9fv14j28qga7xc/2025-08...

That was on both legs, both sides all the way up to my knees

Comment by monerozcash 1 hour ago

>These days I hike a lot, I've had bullseye rashes before and the treatment is so much less worrisome than the rare possibility of developing lyme.

Yeah, if you develop a rash from a tick bite that even remotely looks like it could be lyme, just go to a pet store to buy amoxicillin (you can get exactly the same stuff they give to humans) if you can't quickly find a doctor who'll take it seriously enough to immediately write you a prescription (unless, of course, they have a very well reasoned explanation for not doing so).

The potential consequences of not getting fast treatment are indeed so so much worse than the practically non-existent consequences of taking amoxicillin when you don't need it, unless you're a crazy hypochondriac who constantly thinks they might have lyme.

But hey, also don't blindly trust medical advice from HN commenters telling you to go buy pet store antibiotics :)

Comment by jtsiskin 15 hours ago

I gave their example “correct” prompt (“Flat, circular, non-itchy, non-painful red rash with a ring, diffuse throughout trunk. Follows week of chills and intense night sweats, plus fatigue and general malaise”) to both ChatGPT and Gemini. And both said Lyme disease as their #1 diagnosis. So maybe it is okay to diagnose yourself with LLMs, just do it correctly!

Comment by orwin 12 hours ago

A LLM isn't able to give me a somewhat complete answer (and sometimes gives a dead wrong one) when I ask information about a eu4 or stellaris mechanic, and those are video games with thousands of articles and videos written about them. How you can trust it with medical questions is beyond me.

Comment by only-one1701 16 hours ago

Oh my God dude it’s ok to say “don’t use LLMs to diagnose yourself, that’s not what they’re for.” You don’t need to apologize for using LLMs wrong.

Comment by arjie 15 hours ago

The first sentence of the article says:

> If you read nothing else, read this: do not ever use an AI or the internet for medical advice.

Your comment seems out of place unless the article was edited in the 10 minutes since the comment was written.

Comment by only-one1701 15 hours ago

I was referring to the word “misused” in the title.

Comment by tapete2 6 hours ago

lol and the post is gone. I had to stop reading after this

> I have this rash on my body, but it's not itchy or painful, so I don't think it's an emergency?

If you cannot use punctuation correctly, of course you cannot diagnose yourself.

Comment by blakesterz 15 hours ago

They wrote...

  "Turns out it was Lyme disease (yes, the real one, not the fake one) and it (nearly) progressed to meningitis"

What does "not the fake one" mean, I must be missing something?

Comment by shortrounddev2 15 hours ago

Disclaimer: not a doctor (obviously), ask someone who is qualified, but this is what the ID doctor told me:

Lyme is a bacterial infection, and can be cured with antibiotics. Once the bacteria is gone, you no longer have Lyme disease.

However, there is a lot of misinformation about Lyme online. Some people think Lyme is a chronic, incurable disease, which they call "chronic lyme". Often, when a celebrity tells people they have lyme disease, this is what they mean. Chronic lyme is not a real thing - it is a diagnosis given to wealthy people by unqualified conmen or unscrupulous doctors in response to vague, hard to pin symptoms

Comment by cogman10 11 hours ago

To add a few things.

The late stage of lyme disease is painful. Like "I think I'm dying" painful. It does have a range of symptoms, but those show up like 3 to 6 weeks after the initial infection.

A lot of people claiming chronic lyme disease don't remember this stage.

Lyme disease does cause a range of problems if left untreated. But not before the "I think I'm dying" stage. It's basically impossible for someone, especially with a lot of wealth, to get lyme disease and not have it caught early on.

Consider the OP's story. They tried to not treat it but ended up thinking "OMG, I think I have meningitis and I'm going to die!".

Lyme can kill, but it rarely does. Partially because before it gets to that point it drives people to seek medical attention.

Comment by 15 hours ago

Comment by pogue 12 hours ago

Here's a copy of the missing article:

https://archive.ph/kg3Dw

Comment by cheald 15 hours ago

I think the author took the wrong lesson here. I've had doctors misdiagnose me just as readily as I've had LLMs misdiagnose me - but I can sit there and plug at an LLM in separate unrelated contexts for hours if I'd like, and follow up assertions with checks to primary sources. That's not to say that LLMs replace doctors, but that neither is perfect and that at the end of the day you have to have your brain turned on.

The real lesson here is "learn to use an LLM without asking leading questions". The author is correct, they're very good at picking up the subtext of what you are actually asking about and shaping their responses to match. That is, after all, the entire purpose of an LLM. If you can learn to query in such a way that you avoid introducing unintended bias, and you learn to recognize when you've "tainted" a conversation and start a new one, they're marvelous exploratory (and even diagnostic) tools. But you absolutely cannot stop with their outputs - primary sources and expert input remain supreme. This should be particularly obvious to any actual experts who do use these tools on a regular basis - such as developers.

Comment by shortrounddev2 15 hours ago

No, the lesson here is never use an LLM to diagnose you, full stop. See a real doctor. Do not make the same mistake as me

Comment by monerozcash 15 hours ago

"Don't ask LLMs leading questions" is a perfectly valid lesson here too. If you're going to ask an LLM for a medical diagnosis, you should at the very least know how to use LLMs properly.

I'm certainly not suggesting that you should ask LLM for medical diagnoses, but still, someone who actually understands the tool they're using would likely not have ended up in your situation.

Comment by shortrounddev2 15 hours ago

If you're going to ask an LLM for a medical diagnosis, stop what you're doing and ask a doctor instead. There is no good advice downstream of the decision to ask an LLM for a medical diagnosis

Comment by monerozcash 15 hours ago

What about the multiple people who have reported receiving incredibly useful information after asking an LLM, when doctors were useless?

Should they not have done so?

Like this guy for example, was he being stupid? https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/37561550/teen-saves-life-cha...

Or this guy? https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1krzu6t/chatgpt_an...

Or this woman? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43171639

This is a real thing that's happening every day. Doctors are not very good at recognizing rare conditions.

Comment by shortrounddev2 15 hours ago

> What about the multiple people who have reported receiving incredibly useful information after asking an LLM, when doctors were useless?

They got lucky.

This is why I wrote this blog post. I'm sure some people got lucky when an LLM managed to give them the right answer, because they go and brag about it. How many people got the wrong answer? How many of them bragged about their bad decision? This is _selection bias_. I'm writing about my embarrassing lapse of judgment because I doubt anyone else will

Comment by monerozcash 15 hours ago

That's an easy cop out!

AI saves lives, it's selection bias.

AI gives bad advice after being asked leading questions by a user who clearly doesn't know how to use AI correctly, AI is terrible and nobody should ask it about medical stuff.

Or perhaps there's a more reasonable middle ground? "It can be very useful to ask AI medical questions, but you should not rely on it exclusively."

I'm certainly not suggesting that your story isn't a useful example of what can go wrong, but I insist that the conclusions you've reached are in fact mistaken.

The difference between your story and the stories of the people whose lives were saved by AI is that they did generally not blindly trust what the AI told them. It's not necessary to trust AI to receive helpful information, it is basically necessary to trust AI in order to hurt yourself using it.

Comment by looknee 15 hours ago

@shortrounddev2 can you please post the response ChatGPT gave in response to your prompt? That seems pertinent.

Comment by monerozcash 15 hours ago

It'd be interesting to see the entire chat, lots of people seem to just keep using the same chat window and end up poisoning the LLM with massive amounts of unhelpful context.

Comment by xiphias2 15 hours ago

Another poorly written article that doesn't even specify the LLM being used.

Both ChatGPT o3 and 5.1 Pro models helped me a lot diagnosing illnesses with the right queries. I am using lots of queries with different context / context length for medical queries as they are very serious.

Also they have better answer if I am using medical language as they retrieve answers from higher quality articles.

I still went to doctors and got more information from them.

Also I do blood tests and MRI before going to doctors and the great doctors actually like that I go there prepared but still open to their diagnosis.

Comment by jfindper 15 hours ago

The lack of awareness to advocate using LLMs for medical advice on an article about how bad of an idea that is... It's astounding.

Comment by monerozcash 1 hour ago

There are people receiving life-saving medical advice from LLMs every single day.

The problem isn't getting medical advice from LLMs, it's blindly trusting the medical advice a LLM gives you.

You do not need to trust the LLM for it to be able to save your life, you do need to trust the LLM for it to be able to harm you.

Comment by shortrounddev2 15 hours ago

Read to the bottom. I didn't specify the LLM because it doesn't matter. It's not the fault of the LLM, it's the fault of the user

Comment by only-one1701 15 hours ago

It’s the fault of the tool!

Comment by maplethorpe 15 hours ago

They didn't say what model they used. The difference between GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 is night and day. This is exactly what I'd expect from 3.5, but 4 wouldn't make this mistake.

Note: I haven't updated this comment template recently, so the versions may be a bit outdated.

Comment by arjie 15 hours ago

This is the Google Search problem all over again. When Google first came out, it was so much better than other search engines that people were finding websites (including obscure ones) that would answer the questions they had. Others at the time would get upset that these people were concluding things from the search. Imagine you asked if Earth was a 4-corner 4-day simultaneous time cube. You'd find a website where someone explained that it was. Many people would then conclude that Earth was indeed a 4-corner 4-day simultaneous time cube where Jesus, Socrates, the Clintons, and Einstein lived in different parts.

But it was just a search tool. It could only tell you if someone else was thinking about it. Chatbots as they are presented are a pretty sophisticated generation tool. If you ground them, they function fantastically to produce tools. If you allow them to search, they function well at finding and summarizing what people have said.

But Earth is not a 4-corner 4-day simultaneous time cube. That's on you to figure out. Everyone I know these days has a story of a doctor searching for their symptoms on Gemini or whatever in front of them. But it reminds me of a famous old hacker koan:

> A newbie was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning it off and on.

> Thomas Knight, seeing what the student was doing, reprimanded him: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it without understanding of what is wrong."

> Knight then power-cycled the machine.

> The machine worked.

You cannot ask an LLM without understanding the answer and expect it to be right. The doctor understands the answer. They ask the LLM. It is right.

Comment by hansmayer 15 hours ago

> "If you read nothing else, read this: do not ever use an AI or the internet for medical advice. Go to a doctor."

Yeah, no shit Sherlock? I´d be absolutely embarrassed to even admit to something like this, let alone share the "wisdom perls" like "dont use a machine which guesses its outputs based on whatever text it has been fed" to freaking diagnose yourself? Who would have thought, an individual professional with decades in theoretical and practical training, AND actual human intelligence (Or do we need to call it HGI now), plus tons of experience is more trustworthy, reliable and qualified to deal with something as serious as human body. Plus there are hundreds of thousands of such individuals and they dont need to boil an ocean every time they are solving a problem in their domain of expertise. Compared to a product of entshittified tech industry which in the recent years has only ever given us irrelevant "apps" to live in, without addressing really important issues of our time. Heck, even Peter Thiel agrees with this, at least in his "Zero to one" he did.

Comment by foobarbecue 15 hours ago

That's my feeling, but I have a friend who is a MD and an enthusiastic supporter of people getting medical info from LLMs...

Comment by monerozcash 1 hour ago

Getting medical info from LLMs is great and can save your life.

Blindly trusting medical info from LLMs is idiotic and can kill you.

Pretty much any tool will be dangerous if misused.

Comment by shortrounddev2 15 hours ago

To be honest, I am pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, but I figured I'd post my story because of that. There are lots of people who misdiagnose themselves doing something stupid on the internet (or teenagers who kill themselves because they fell in love with some Waifu LLM), but you never hear about it because they either died or were too embarrassed to talk about it. Better to be transparent that I did something stupid so that hopefully someone else reads about it and doesn't do the same thing I did

Comment by monerozcash 15 hours ago

Don't ask LLMs leading questions if you don't want terrible answers?

Comment by 15 hours ago

Comment by sofixa 15 hours ago

I'm guessing this is the USA with the absurd healthcare system, because otherwise this part is wild:

> You need to go to the emergency room right now".

> So, I drive myself to the emergency room

It is absolutely wild that a doctor can tell you "you need to go to the emergency right now", and that is an act left to someone who is obviously so unwell they need to go to the ER right now. With a neck so stiff, was OP even able to look around properly while driving?

Comment by morshu9001 15 hours ago

Uh, standard in America is to take an Uber Ambulance

Comment by jeffbee 15 hours ago

Imagine reaching this conclusion but going on to suggest that one should read pop psychology books by Ezra Klein and Jonathan Haidt to understand human cognition.

Comment by ikrenji 15 hours ago

bro described the perfect LLM prompt that would have got him the right diagnosis instantly. instead he put in some garbage and got garbage back

Comment by OutOfHere 10 hours ago

An LLM is just a hypothesis generator, as is a doctor. Both can be wrong. Only a doctor can be dismissive though; an LLM is never dismissive, which scores it an extra point.

It is up to you to query them for the best output, and put the pieces together. If you bias them wrongly, it's your own fault.

For every example where an LLM misdiagnosed, a PCP could do much worse. People should think of them as idea generators, subjecting the generated ideas to diagnostic validation tests. If an idea doesn't pan out, keep querying until you hit upon the right idea.

Comment by Escapado 15 hours ago

Interesting story. I want to agree with the general advice not to use it for that - especially if that is how you use it. And I want to preface this with: Don’t take this as advice, I just want to share my experience here. I tend to do it anyway and had fairly large success so far but I use the LLM differently if I have a health issue that bothers me. First I open Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT in their latest, highest thinking budget installment. Then I tell them about my symptoms I give a fairly detailed description of my person and my medical history. I prompt them specifically to ask detailed questions like a physician would and ask them to ask me to perform tests to rule out or zoom in on different hypothesis about what is might have. After going back and forth, if they all agree on a similar thing or a set of similar things I usually take this as a good sign I might be on the right track and check if I should talk to a professional or not (edging on the side of caution). If they can’t agree I would usually try to get an appointment to see a professional and try to get sooner rather than later if anything potentially dangerous popped up during the back and forth or if I feel sufficiently bad.

Now, I live in Germany where in the last 20 years our healthcare system has fallen victim to neoliberal capitalism and since I am publicly insured by choice I often have to wait for weeks to see a specialist so more often than not LLMs have helped me stay calm and help myself as best as I can. However I still view the output less as a the output or a medical professional and try to stay skeptic along the way. I feel like the augment my guesswork and judgement, but not replace it.

Comment by lenerdenator 15 hours ago

I think you'll see this happen a lot more. Not just in the US where docs cost money, but anywhere there's a shortage of docs and/or it's a pain in the butt to go to one.

YouTuber ChubbyEmu (who makes medical case reviews in a somewhat entertaining and accessible format) recently released a video about a man who suffered a case of brominism (which almost never happens anymore) after consulting an LLM. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU

Comment by abstractspoon 6 hours ago

Lol

Comment by shortrounddev2 14 hours ago

I've tried removing my post because the comment section here has become a platform for AI enthusiasts to spread dangerous medical misinformation. As HN does not really care about user privacy, I am unable to actually delete it. I renamed the post to [Removed], but it appears the admins are uninterested in respecting the intent of this, and renamed the post back to its original title.

Moral of the story kids: don't post on HN

Comment by monerozcash 1 hour ago

Nobody here is advocating blindly trusting medical advice from LLMs, that is not "dangerous medical misinformation".

Even if you absolutely despise LLMs, this is just silly. The problem here isn't "AI enthusiasts", you're getting called out for the absolute lack of nuance in your article.

Yes, people shouldn't do what you did. Yes, people will unfortunately continue doing what you did until they get better advice. But the correct nuanced advice in a HN context is not "never ask LLMs for medical advice", you will rightfully get flamed for that. The correct advice is "never trust medical advice from LLMs, it could be helpful or it could kill you".

Comment by Gibbon1 15 hours ago

> In July of 2025 I began developing flu-like symptoms. I began to feel feverish and would go to sleep with the most intense chills of my life (it felt like what I imagine being naked at the south pole feels like) and would wake up drenched in sweat.

Fuck man if this is you go to the ER.

Comment by reenorap 15 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by WhyOhWhyQ 15 hours ago

I think it's morally wrong to trust a child's well-being to an LLM over a trained medical professional, and I feel strongly enough about this to express that here.

Comment by jfindper 15 hours ago

I agree with you, and reading some of the takes in this thread is actually blowing my mind.

I cannot believe that the top-voted comment right now is saying to not trust doctors, use an LLM to diagnose yourself and others.

Comment by vorpalhex 15 hours ago

You've never had "the experience".

I'll share mine.

Unusual severe one sided eye pain. Go to regular doctor's, explain, get told it's a "stye" and do hot compresses.

Problem gets worse, I go to urgent care. Urgent care doc takes one look at me and immediately sends me to the ER saying it's severe and she can't diagnose it because she is unqualified.

Go to ER, get seen by two specialists, a general practicioner and a gaggle of nurses. Get told it's a bad eye infection, put on strong steroids.

Problem gets worse (more slowly at least).

Schedule an urgent appoint with an opthalmologist. For some reason the scheduling lady just like, comprehends my urgency and gets me a same day appointment.

Opthalmologist does 5 minutes of exam, puts in some eye drops and pain is immediately gone. She puts me on a very serious steroid with instructions to dose hourly and visit her daily. Only reason I am seeing out of both eyes today.

As the top comment says, do not just "trust" Doctors. About 70% of hospital deaths are due to preventable mistakes in the hospital. People who are invested in their own care, who seek second opinions, who argue (productively) with their doctor have the best outcomes by far.

Nobody said not to work with doctors, but blindly trusting a single doctor will seriously harm your outcomes.

Comment by jfindper 14 hours ago

>About 70% of hospital deaths are due to preventable mistakes in the hospital.

It's awful that you had a bad experience, but no. Nowhere near 70% of hospital deaths are from preventable mistakes.

I would also note that in your experience, you ended up trusting a different doctor (ophthalmologist), not ChatGPT. Second opinions from other qualified professionals is a thumbs up from me.

Comment by malfist 13 hours ago

I would add to your note, that the person that was correct in their care was the actual expert. Doctors are experts in their fields, but until they saw an ophthalmologist, they didn't see the right practitioner.

Just like I wouldn't go to my podiatrist to treat a complex case of rosecea, urgent care and GCP aren't for specialized, complex and rare cases.

Comment by ponector 12 hours ago

I think chatgpt can help to argue with doctors and get to the specialist faster.

Comment by hiyer 12 hours ago

The author doesn't say don't trust doctors or trust chatgpt. He says don't trust "a single doctor" and look for a second opinion whenever possible.

Comment by daveguy 15 hours ago

> About 70% of hospital deaths are due to preventable mistakes in the hospital.

Sure sounds like an asspull stat. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence. Do you have a reference for that? Care to share?

Comment by cogman10 14 hours ago

At the high end, it's about 4.1%

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31965525/

Comment by andrepd 15 minutes ago

7 out of 10 made up statistics use the number 7 :p

Comment by dingnuts 14 hours ago

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Comment by dingnuts 14 hours ago

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Comment by nataliste 13 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by tomhow 10 hours ago

This is a completely unacceptable comment on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're looking for a higher standard of discourse here. These lines in particular are relevant:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

We have to ban accounts that continue to comment like this, so please take a moment to remind yourself of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Comment by WhyOhWhyQ 12 hours ago

Everyone on this website has thoughts on LLM's, not just you.

LLM's are heavily biased by leading questions, which is not a good property in a doctor. They also tend to respond in a way to please the prompter, which might be a frustrated parent, not in a way which is impartial and based on good medical practices. They frequently speak with high confidence and low accuracy.

Comment by jfindper 13 hours ago

Maybe you should put this comment into ChatGPT and ask it if you should take a step away from the computer for a little bit.

>The problem is you're all dumb and getting dumber.

But yeah, you're the only smart person here. Clap clap.

Comment by nataliste 13 hours ago

>Of course, you and every other histrionic lemming won't take this to heart or even really read it. You'll skim it, pretend that's the same thing, look for the no-no words, hammer your keyboard, confabulate a response to something no one actually said, then pat yourself on the back for having slapped down yet another hand reaching out to lift you out of your own ignorance.

Like clockwork.

Comment by jfindper 13 hours ago

Of course I'm not going to read fucking paragraphs of pretentious writing calling me dumb.

Genius call.

Comment by 10 hours ago

Comment by nutjob2 4 hours ago

This is misguided, the moral imperative is to get to the correct diagnosis and treatment by any means possible, usually an "all of the above" strategy. In my experience many doctors are not ideal, and this "always consult a doctor" is legal boilerplate to avoid being sued.

Usually you've got less than a 50-50 chance of getting useful help from a doctor on any one visit.

In my case multiple doctor's treatment of my hypertension was largely useless because it followed the "typical" treatment. I only found what worked for me by accident.

In other cases my own research was far superior to a regular doctor's visit.

I can also quote the experience of a family member whose research into a major surgery paid huge dividends and if they had followed the advice of the first 2 doctors the surgery would very likely have failed.

The chances of getting correctly diagnosed and treated for a problem that is not obvious is surprisingly close to zero unless you have a very good doctor who has plenty of time for you.

Comment by reenorap 15 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by jfindper 15 hours ago

>How does this line up with your religious belief that doctors are infallible and should be 100% trusted?

They did not say that in their comment.

Replying in obvious bad faith makes your original comment even less credible than it already is.

Comment by nataliste 15 hours ago

It's an incredibly credible comment. But if you have a need to have slavish trust in authority, be it LLMs or MDs, yeah, it'll look preposterous that someone might have an independent mind and (gasp) believe their own lying eyes before a supposedly arcane, but in fact incredibly banal and fallible priesthood.

Comment by SketchySeaBeast 15 hours ago

But they aren't believing their eyes, they are believing a LLM. Wanna talk about a fallible priesthood? People are becoming adepts of the babble box.

They make an argument to always "verify", but if your first source is ChatGPT, where are you verifying next? And why not go their first?

Comment by nataliste 14 hours ago

If you actually slowed down and read what I wrote, you'd see that I said that people blindly believing in either LLMs or MDs are stupid (as did the OP).

And gee, what are people supposed to do when they encounter potentially unreliable information from a generic non-vetted source? The same thing you do with literally any other one:

https://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu/what%E2%80%99s-wrong-wi...

> If you do start with Wikipedia, you should make sure articles you read contain citations–and then go read the cited articles to check the accuracy of what you read on Wikipedia. For research papers, you should rely on the sources cited by Wikipedia authors rather than on Wikipedia itself.

> There are other sites besides Wikipedia that feature user-generated content, including Quora and Reddit. These sites may show up in your search results, especially when you type a question into Google. Keep in mind that because these sites are user-authored, they are not reliable sources of fact-checked information. If you find something you think might be useful to you on one of those sites, you should look for another source for this information.

> The fact that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic research doesn't mean that it's wrong to use basic reference materials when you're trying to familiarize yourself with a topic. In fact, the Harvard librarians can point you to specialized encyclopedias in different fields that offer introductory information. These sources can be particularly useful when you need background information or context for a topic you're writing about.

This isn't rocket science.

Comment by 14 hours ago

Comment by avra 15 hours ago

> All without a co-pay

The author of the blog post also mentioned they tried to avoid paying for an unnecessary visit to the doctor. I think the issue is somewhere else. As a European, personally I would go to the doctor and while sitting in the waiting room I would ask an LLM out of curiosity.

Comment by beAbU 6 hours ago

Normal people just get a second opinion from a different medical professional, if they disagree with the first one's diagnoses -- something we've been doing for decades at this point.

But what do I know.

Comment by andrepd 15 hours ago

I swear on all that is holy, I cannot tell if this is sophisticated satire or you are actually for real. 100% not being facetious.

Comment by ludicrousdispla 1 hour ago

I've started thinking that many pro-LLM comments are placed so that they are later used when training LLMs.

Comment by sofixa 15 hours ago

> But at least ChatGPT doesn't try to rush you through and ignore your worries just because they want to make their next appoint.

But it is a sycophant and will confirm your suspicions, whatever they are and regardless if they're true.

Comment by hn_throw2025 3 hours ago

I use a variety of LLMs.

In my experience to date, ChatGPT really is a sycophant. Claude can be moderately stubborn. Gemini is usually very stubborn, practically unmovable, unless you present new facts or make a rock solid counter-argument.

Comment by marcellus23 15 hours ago

Hence his emphasis on not trusting it, which was right before the sentence you're quoting here.

Comment by nataliste 15 hours ago

Just want to chime in amidst the ensuing dog-pile to say that my experiences match yours and you're not crazy, but I'm also an empirically-minded arch-skeptic. Curious: you're not left-handed by any chance, are you?

Comment by cogman10 15 hours ago

> a child's fractured arm

... Um what?

The only way to diagnose a fractured arm is an xray. You can suspect the arm is fractured (rotating it a few directions) but ultimately a muscle injury will feel identical to a fracture especially for a kid.

Please, if you suspect a fracture just take your kid to the doctor. Don't waste your time asking ChatGPT if this might be a fracture.

This just feels beyond silly to me imagining the scenario this would arise in. You have a kid crying because their arm hurts. They are probably protectively holding it and won't let you touch it. And your first instinct is "Hold on, let me ask chatgpt what it thinks. 'Hey chat GPT, my kid is her crying really loud and holding onto their arm. What could this mean?'"

What possessed you to waste time like that?

Comment by reenorap 15 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by cogman10 15 hours ago

> How does this line up with your religious belief that doctors are infallible and should be 100% trusted?

Because the way you phrased it with the article in question made it sound like you hadn't first gone to the doctor. This isn't a question about doctors being fallible or not but rather what first instincts are when medical issues arise.

> uneducated comment filled with weird assumptions.

No, not uneducated nor were these assumptions weird as other commenters obviously made the same ones I did.

I'll not delete my comment, why should I? The advice is still completely valid. Go to the doctor first, not GPT.

Comment by jfindper 15 hours ago

>How does this line up with your religious belief that doctors are infallible and should be 100% trusted?

Hilariously, this is the second time you posted this exact line, to yet another person who _didn't say this_!

Comment by shortrounddev2 15 hours ago

> Not using ChatGPT in 2026 for medical issues and arming yourself with information [...] would be foolish in my opinion.

Using ChatGPT for medical issues is the single dumbest thing you can do with ChatGPT

Comment by hn_throw2025 4 hours ago

True story. A friend was having abdominal pain. They were avoiding seeking medical help, thinking it would pass. The health service is overstretched in our country, and GP appointments can take time. I couldn’t help wondering if it was something more serious, like appendicitis. I discussed their symptoms with a LLM which said it sounds very much like appendicitis, that they should go to the ER immediately, and that they should bring a bag because they would likely be admitted and surgery would follow ASAP.

Guess what happened.

Comment by ndsipa_pomu 4 hours ago

You can diagnose appendicitis using boring old internet searches. As I remember, loss of appetite and the pain moving over time are key.

Comment by hn_throw2025 3 hours ago

Boring old internet searches wouldn’t have taken in the specifics I supplied.

And they mostly just come to a conclusion, rather than actionable advice I was able to pass on, like take a bag and avoid eating because they might want to operate soon.

Comment by andrepd 4 minutes ago

Hey look, a reference website written by professionals has all the information you need, with no hallucinated falsehoods which are indistinguishable from the point of view of a non-specialist https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/appendicitis/

But it's 2025, so old fashioned.

Comment by ndsipa_pomu 32 minutes ago

They're much less likely to be hallucinated falsehoods though

Comment by buellerbueller 16 hours ago

Play stupid games; win stupid prizes.

(Also, it is the fault of the LLM vendor too, for allowing medical questions to be answered.)

Comment by morshu9001 15 hours ago

If the LLM starts telling me it can't answer my question, I switch LLMs

Comment by robrain 15 hours ago

And when you’ve finally switched to the last LLM and it tells you it can’t answer you, and you decide not to use LLMs for important life-changing questions anymore, your world will be a better place.

Comment by monerozcash 15 hours ago

Not really, no. I know I can't trust what the LLM tells me, I still want the answer.

This should be a configurable option.

Comment by morshu9001 15 hours ago

Exactly. Fine if they have to put a warning label on it.

Comment by measurablefunc 15 hours ago

The answers will soon have ads for vitamins & minerals.

Comment by buellerbueller 15 hours ago

Dr. Nigel West's Medical Elixir

Comment by Starlevel004 15 hours ago

> If you read nothing else, read this: do not ever use an AI or the internet for medical advice.

I completely disagree. I think we should let this act as a form of natural selection, and once every pro-AI person is dead we can get back to doing normal things again.

Comment by tsoukase 14 hours ago

Using an LLM to diagnose/treat a health issue is not yet mature and not going to be such in the foreseeable future. It's not like predicting a protein fold or presenting a business report. Medical advice is in many dimensions incompatible with artificial support: non-quantifiable, fuzzy, case-specific, intimate, empathic and awfully responsible. Even AGI is not enough. In order to become a doctor, the machine has to develop next-level dexterities, namely to follow the interplay of multiple concurrent factors on various types of living tissue. Multiple attempts to bring Decision Support to medicine have failed and LLM is one more. Sure you can take an advice, but it will be the less useful of all the other types you can have.