I think this is really cool tech, but that’s not at all the takeaway from this. $100,000 and 30 hospital visits are what created the data for the tool to figure out the diagnosis. The question to ask to make your point relevant is what fragment of that data was necessary, keeping in mind that you can’t change the order, because the patient themselves went in that order.
That will be a real deal. Recommend the exact medical services you need. It can potentially optimize the medical supply chain, reducing cost and waiting time for everyone.
Honestly, as somebody fighting... something? I wish this was the case already. I don't know what's wrong with me. My first contact doctor has shared some things I can try, but nobody knows if they will do anything + it takes a shit ton of time (and if I don't want to wait then money as well). It's truly a lose-lose scenario how the current Polish medical system works and it's even worse knowing it's still better than, for example, the American one.
No one remembers Expert Systems which were supposed to do this before but failed spectacularly due to the complexity of the issues, some of which were political and contractual, and the requirement of actual intelligence to resolve them.
> The most frustrating part wasn't just the lack of answers - it was how fragmented everything was. Each doctor only saw their piece of the puzzle: the orthopedist looked at joint pain, the endocrinologist checked hormones, the rheumatologist ran their own tests. No one was looking at the whole picture.
Or just as a statement: human physiology is so complex that no one person can reliably diagnose every ailment, whereas a large AI can reason over multiple highly specialized domains holistically.
> Why didn't the medical procession find my autoimmune disease
The post is vague, but the doctors did find the “likely” autoimmune condition around the same time that the LLM suggested it.
Which is not surprising, because this tool was simply taking the medical records and doctors reports and putting them into the LLM.
The author has also been dodging questions about what the LLM actually said. Reading between the lines, it sounds like it gave a list of possible explanations including “maybe an autoimmune condition”, not an actual diagnosis.
I'm not clear on the timeline - did the patient use a tool to help doc get to a diagnosis, or did this happen in retrospect? My read is the medical profession did, but it took longer to get there. The tool is redeemed in this case because it landed on the same (correct) diagnosis as the rheumatologist, using the test results, notes and diagnostic journey that resulted from $100K and 30 hospital visits.
Cause they're fallible, overworked humans. We like to pretend doctors are superhuman but they're just the same as the rest of us.
The more you go beyond the common diseases that they see a hundred times a year the more your chances of getting the right treatment approach zero. Occam's razor is usually right when diagnosing people, but it kills the uncommon cases.
"it wasn't until I visited a rheumatologist who looked at the combination of my symptoms and genetic test results that I learned I likely had an autoimmune condition."
Genuinely? There's probably some less-than-obvious test that no one thought to run, but that if someone did run would make all the pieces fall into place.
I've shared this story before on here a few times: I have ankylosing spondylitis, and it took me a few years to get diagnosed, but even after I got diagnosed treatment didn't seem to help. Humira, steroid shots, none of it. All I could do was eat NSAIDs like candy, which helped in the short term but kinda fucked me over in the long term.
Then I saw a gastroenterologist to ask about a hemorrhoid, and he took one look at me and my file—walking with a cane at a very young age, HLA B27+, offhand complaints about "IBS" (note: it's not officially IBS unless you've ruled out other problems!)—and recommended me for a colonoscopy. My health insurance is decent, so I agreed, and he saw a bunch of inflammation in there. Turns out I have Crohn's, and the AS is likely downstream of that; when I started taking oral medication that isn't supposed to have any effect outside the GI tract, my arthritis vanished.
But your average provider won't see a patient with joint pain and skin problems and think "well obviously we need to stick a camera up their butt."