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Comment by yapyap

18 hours ago

if your use of chatgpt saves you from a trip to the doctor I would be very concerned

ChatGPT is probably adequate to provide a slightly more user-friendly but also slight-less-reliable replacement for a reliable consumer-oriented medical reference book or website for the task of determining whether self-care without seeing a doctor or seeing a doctor is appropriate for symptoms not obviously posing an immediate emergency.

Most doctor visits are for benign matters...

  • The point of the doctorate is for them to make that determination.

    • More constructively, the middle ground of asking a doctor about some minor symptoms over async messaging or tele-appointments (whatever the term for those is), is probably always something to consider for the trivial stuff.

    • My partner works in emergency. Someone came in with a blister on their finger yesterday. They had to see the patient and send them home with a bandaid. Not a good use of resources.

    • Yes and no, you really don't need a deep expertise to diagnose the very common illness.

      And that's where chatgpt is doing great.

    • There is no need to nitpick obvious comments. If you have a running nose and fever in winter, it's 99.99% a cold and a doctor visit will do nothing to help you, yet millions of people waste doctors time for that