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I meant “order” in the clinical sense: e.g. you have to involve a clinician to get more information.

An LLM might be great for summarizing that wealth of information for a doctor to consume, but it won’t compete with a doctor’s judgement or knowledge of their practice and institutional knowledge.

LLMs, even at their theoretical best, are limited to publicly recorded knowledge. If you want to know how extremely limiting this can be, look at the surgical outcome rates of surgeons by educational experience, vs outcome rates from surgeons based solely on experience. Surgeons with more experience have far better outcomes than those with any other attribute.

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> it won’t compete with a doctor’s judgement or knowledge of their practice and institutional knowledge.

I vehemently disagree, based on the number of times doctors have misdiagnosed me, and AI or other internet searches have yielded a correct diagnosis and treatment.

It won't compete with the top 5% of doctors, but most of the time you are not going to get to see a top-5% doctor.

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Doctors can have any of: good judgment, high experience, poor judgment, or low experience.

Having a doctor does not guarantee good judgement or good experience. But an LLM is guaranteed to have neither judgement nor experience.

Get a second opinion, or a third. Don’t get zero opinions.

And most of the time, you don’t need a 5% doctor, you need to find the one with the correct background of experience. Every misdiagnosis I’ve ever had was because I was at the wrong specialist. If you don’t think you’re getting the right care, sure, ask your LLM for alternatives. Then go speak to specialists in those fields.

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