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Comment by haldujai

2 days ago

How so?

ChatGPT will actually look at your whole medical history, listen to you, think and check multiple different options before making a decision. You can spend hours chatting with it back and forth.

An average human doctor has maybe 15 minutes allotted to getting to know you, analyse and determine a course of action. Which is usually "take some ibuprofen and let's see if it goes away". Then you go again in two weeks with the same thing, it's a different doctor and the context has been reset unless you do an info dump from the previous visits and try not to forget anything.

And if you infodump too much or use actual medical diagnosis terms, the Dr gets defensive because you're stepping on THEIR area of expertise and will start pushing back even from the obvious just because they can.

  • I wonder if in your case (which is very common) the issue is a mismatch between expectations and reality. The medical system as we know is not designed for someone to listen to you and do a back and forth for hours. If we did that we would only treat 2-4 patients a day. It’s also not particularly helpful.

    Time spent in a medical encounter is tied to patient satisfaction but there is rapid drop off for clinical benefit especially in the current day where investigations are more important than a physical exam in most cases and more than history in a substantial portion.

    15 minutes is what we book as follow-ups or minor assessments in US+Canada, usually sufficient for most things. New consults or complex patients are 30-60 minutes.

    Infodumping is not particularly helpful. Doctors are trained to use a combination of open and closed questions to guide the encounter based on their thinking and understanding of medicine. It’s relevant past medical history as not every symptom or past disease is necessarily useful in assessing what’s wrong today.

  • > has maybe 15 minutes allotted to getting to know you [...] Then you go again in two weeks with the same thing, it's a different doctor and the context has been reset

    This is not how doctors work in most of the world. Not having an actual primary care physician that is able to keep track of each patient over multiple years means they are skipping out on one of their most important duties. You should advocate for a better standard of care rather than resorting to hallucinating chatbots.

    • All of the country of Finland works like that.

      Nobody sees the same doctor twice except in very rare cases - usually when the doctor is a specialist with no alternative