Our AI Midwife

AI's biggest strength IMO is as a checklist guy.

Whatever it is being asked, it is great at throwing out new suggestions. This MRI idea sounds like another one of them.

It works well because humans are crap at checklists. For more or less anything you can think of, you'll come up with maybe 4 items, and the AI will add a few more. They may not be relevant, but the AI is very thorough.

A few comments here making categorical assertions about AI being worse than human doctors, or no proof of it does any better. There are literally studies out there. I've read only their synopses by people on social media (including comments here on HN!) but they exist and we should be basing our discourse in that evidence.

To summarize my understanding: just like all things AI, the current frontier is quite "jagged". But there is broadly accepted evidence that AI does do better than human doctors, and even human doctors with AI, in several key aspects (like diagnostic reasoning!) while it sucks in others (pharmacology!)

And just like all things AI, as TFA suggests, the real advantage might simply come down to it being widely available, massively knowledgeable, relentless, and infinitely patient with us.

> the doctors start saying things like, “Have you considered using a surrogate?” and, “Sure, the last 5 embryo transfers failed, but what if we try a 6th and cross our fingers really hard?”

To be fair, this level of reasoning is on par with free tier chatgpt.

To me this story is less about a triumph of AI and more about a failure of the healthcare system.

> Strangely, there were many times where ChatGPT decided it would answer our medical question, but not in the form of a TV medical script. The tides had completely turned!

I've noticed this happens a lot with characters that don't have any long lines and/or have limited vocabulary.

Furby trails off pretty quickly, Abathur from StarCraft 2 (great for shortening code comments BTW) starts talking like a typical LLM after a few sentences.

As you read these stories, keep in mind that there will never be an astralcodexten.com guest essay from someone who spent time trying to diagnose a health condition with AI and it didn't help or even caused some harm. And that's probably the most common experience.

Yes, health systems worldwide have a number of problems caused by the need to operate at a scale and manage costs, same as with primary education. AI can create some efficiencies, but it almost certainly solves fewer healthcare or education problems than most AI maximalists believe.

Gemini 3 correctly diagnosed the cause of my skin issues that a real dermatologist failed to diagnose, despite multiple visits. I followed its advice and now the issues are completely gone.

The more time I spend with the US medical system, the more I realize that nobody cares about your health as much as you do, and you really do need to learn how to engage with it, understand what's happening, and then decode how the system works and actively advocate for your own care.

It doesn't matter how great your doctors are, you're still only going to get an hour or so of their time per month if you are REALLY lucky.

Navigating this is really hard. The more AI assistance I can get the better.

Really makes you think

I got sent this post by a friend yesterday and I read it with my wife (physician). It was interesting although the selective inclusion of details as part of writing a compelling narrative made it difficult to interpret the experience of using AI.

The post seems to portray the fibroid as objectively the cause of the symptoms, although there is no actual evidence of that. My wife tells me that fibroids grow and shrink in size over time, and that larger studies trying to quantify fibroids as a cause of infertility have been inconclusive. A point in time MRI seems to be correlation rather than causation.

It seems the common theme using AI for personal health issues is that post writers (partly due to privacy and length concerns) leave out the gory details like a full timeline of what tests were suggested, what they showed, how many providers were visited, and what treatments were trialled. The timeline is not really clear in this case, but clearly a lot of expensive tests, treatments, and providers happened in the almost four (!) years since they started using AI. Some of those interventions might have happened due to AI advice, and there are clues to this like the mention of possible endometriosis in the biopsy result. Unfortunately, there is just not enough info in the post to know.

That being said, it's clear that AI is helpful for explaining and assisting in advocating for health and luckily there was a positive outcome. Hopefully we can work out the optimal way to incorporate it into the health system.

This story is written like it vindicates AI medicine but really it seems like the human medical system dropped the ball on the MRI. ChatGPT didn't have any brilliant insight, it just (eventually) suggested the same thing a human doctor had already suggested, but this time the author and his wife pushed harder for it to happen.

To use the metaphor from the article, they found the keys in the last place they looked.

> Even if you’re paying a gazillion dollars for IVF treatments, you still only get a few precious moments to talk to your doctor every visit. That’s just how the US medical system works. If you want to plumb the depths of what treatments are possible, or ask super detailed and anxiety ridden questions about every single scan from the latest round of imaging, you’re going to want a chatbot by your side.

Ehm, no. I want doctors by my side working in a system that is not meant to be producing gains for the rich investors but to help the sick and sad.

Just imagine what could be done with all those billions poured into datacenters and GPUs, if they were invested in public goods like a decent health system!