It may feel easy to say doctors should just consider all the options. But telling them an option is worse than just biasing their thinking; they are going to interpret that as information about your symptoms.
If you feel pain in your abdomen but are only talking about your appendix, they are rightfully going to think the pain is in the region of your appendix. They are not going to treat you like you have kidney pain. How could they? If they have to treat all of your descriptions as all the things that you could be relating them to, then that information is practically useless.
If I used GPT for my medical issue last year and everybody took my word for it, I would be dead.
Doctors don't know everything and don't have access to everything, they are just quite a lot better than the alternatives in the vast majority of cases, so your default odds are much better following their recommendation than anything else. Training is worth a lot, and everyone also knows it's not perfect, and that's entirely fine.
This has been a big problem in medicine since the early days of WebMD: Each appointment has a limited time due to the limited supply of doctors and high demand for appointments.
When someone arrives with their own research, the doctor has to make a choice: Do they work with what the patient brought and try to confirm or rule it out, or do they try to walk back their research and start from the beginning?
When doctors appear to disregard the research patients arrive with many patients get very angry. It leads to negative reviews or even formal complaints being filed (usually from encouragement from some Facebook group or TikTok community they were in). There might even be bigger problems if the patient turns out to be correct and the doctor did not embrace the research, which can prompt lawsuits.
So many doctors will err on the side of focusing on patient-provided theories first. Given the finite time available to see each patient (with waiting lists already extending months out in some places) this can crowd out time for getting a big picture discussion through the doctor's own diagnostic process.
When I visit a doctor I try to ground myself to starting with symptoms first and try to avoid biasing toward my thoughts about what it might be. Only if the conversation is going nowhere do I bring out my research, and then only as questions rather than suggestions. This seems to be more helpful than what I did when I was younger, which is research everything for hours and then show up with an idea that I wanted them to confirm or disprove.
A doctor is typically scheduled at 6 patients/hour. In that time they also have to chart, walk between rooms, make up time for the other patients that inevitably went over time, et cetera. The doctor you're seeing probably has a goal of only talking to you for 3 minutes.
This is untrue. General practice physicians are usually at 3 patients per hour. Some specialists can get in the range or 5 or more per hour if assistants handle most of the prep and work.
The average across all specialties is around 3, though.
> In that time they also have to chart, walk between rooms, make up time for the other patients that inevitably went over time, et cetera. The doctor you're seeing probably has a goal of only talking to you for 3 minutes.
I've been through two different medical systems due to job changes/moving. Both of them gave me the option of a 20 minute or 40 minute appointment slot, with the latter requiring some pre-screening to be approved by the staff. I got the time every time I went.
If your doctor is only giving you 3 minutes you need to find a new one.
People not suffering from mental illness will typically not blame 5G for their health concerns.
You've read things that compellingly claim that foo causes xyz symptoms. You also know that some people that have obviously palpable disdain for you claim that foo could never cause these symptoms.
You have xyz symptoms. Are you mentally ill if you think that foo could be the cause?
I'm not so sure. Doctors are trained to check for the most common things that explain the symptoms. "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras" is a saying that is often heard in medicine.
ChatGPT was trained on the same medical textbooks and research papers that doctors are.
Yeah hm I wonder what the difference could possibly be.
I have a family member who had a "rare but obvious" one but it took 5 doctors to get to the diagnosis. What we really need to see are attempts to blind studies and real statistical rigor. It's funny to paint a tunnel on a canvas and get a Tesla to drive into it, but there's a reason studies (and the more blind the better) are the standard.
Doctors hate to hear this, but if you're so poor in communication and social skills that the patient can't/won't follow you any care you've given, your value is lost.
In the future, I think I'll likely review things with ChatGPT and have an opinion and treat the doctor like a ChatGPT session as well--this is opposed to leading the doctor to what I believe I should be doing. I was dismissive about the doctor's advice because it seemed so obvious but more and more, I feel that most of our issues are caused by habitual, daily mistakes--little things that take hold seasonally or over periods of stress that appear like chronic health issues. At least for me.
What you want instead is that the users just describe their problem, as unbiased as possible and with enough detail and then let the expert come up with an appropriate solution that solves the problem.
I try to do that as well when going to the doctor.
Management has realized this. Hey I can outsource to bangalore/hyderabad/east europe/ai, get something that barely works, and just market the crap out of it. Look at the sort of companies, products, and services that dominate markets today. These aren't leaders in quality or engineering. They are leaders in marketing. Marketing is what sells. Marketing can sell billions of steaming turds. Nike shoes are pieces of shit but it's marketing that makes the brand and provides all value in the stock. The world doesn't value quality. It values noise and pretty feathers.
Why can't you name them, and give us some context? Is this based on public info, or not?