Throwaway05
17hr ago
Do you have a source for that?
Throwaway05
17hr ago
You have to keep in mind that a relatively small fraction of the population (often with relevant diagnosis such as personality disorders, anxiety, illness anxiety disorder) are super utilizers of services, inappropriate users of services (such as misuse of mychart physician messaging) and are disproportionately the people complaining online (as well as misusing AI tools).
You see another version of this in the anti-psychiatry movement where people who can't recognize they have an illness because of the illness (ex: schizophrenia) are complaining about being forced into the hospital and take medication when that is the correct thing to do.
As for rationing the simplest example of this is as a good example of over utilization that many people fall into - suffering sometimes is part of life. If you have a viral illness you need to wait it out and take care of yourself most of the time, the doctor will not be able to do anything and rarely is it worth confirming which URI it is. Antibiotics will not do anything useful.
This does not stop people from emphatically making demands.
Throwaway05
19hr ago
Yeah that's fair, we definitely have many posters here who would use a tool like that and be sensible about.
We also have even more people who would do similar stuff and be intensely foolish, and have no awareness of that fact.
Unfortunately the productivity gains from the former are probably outweighed by the damages from the latter.
Throwaway05
19hr ago
If AI was able to write prescriptions for me, I would choose Astra over 95% of doctors.
If you really believe this you should consider your biases. A response to a post noting that AI is telling patients to eat TP should not be "more of this please!"
Especially since the LLMs are well known to flatter the biases of their users, which is something doctors are changed not to do due to the negative outcomes associated with that.
Throwaway05
19hr ago
The problem is that patients do this now and it's a disaster and they don't realize it. Everyone who does outpatient medicine is flooded with instances of patients being sure about something and it being wildly off base, useless, and time consuming because the patient has been convinced of some nonsense that we have to walk back. I'm sure some fraction of people are saving themselves time or getting useful information but it's not well represented in what we actually see.
Part of this is because people don't realize that a lot of medical work involves things like dealing with an anxious patient who repeatedly asks the AI until they get the answer they want, assholes, and things like rationing care (which the AI has no facility with).
Believe it or not a lot of visits (especially to the ED) are pointless and we'd love it if people were successfully using AI for triage.
They aren't.
Throwaway05
20hr ago
I think in a just world you might be right but the reality of the situation is that things have become wrapped up in comorbid political problems and a focus on say, jailing Fauci just firmly distracts from getting any useful done.
Throwaway05
21hr ago
You are never going to know who punched you in the face. You can take steps to avoid getting punched in the face again, regardless of who did it, or you can obsess over who punched you in the face and get punched in the face again and again.
I'd love to know who punched you in the face. I'd love for you to never get punched in the face again, and I'd love to never get punched in the face.
No amount of pressure from the West or anyone else is going to make China stop being sketchy as fuck, it's unlikely we will ever know.
Improving wet market and lab safety is an increasing existential threat.
Don't focus on the former at the expense of the latter.
Throwaway05
23hr ago
Just as public health authorities did themselves no favors by being misleading and overly restricting, COVID skeptics do themselves no favors by overstating the case - both explanations make sense and are plausible, and any conclusive evidence is likely gone. Focus on patching the vulnerabilities over assigning blame and asserting informational superiority.
Throwaway05
1d ago
nd various schemes which are basically "AIs checking other AIs,"
This was my first thought, has this gone anywhere?
Throwaway05
1d ago
The problem is the error rate (for professional use) and misuse with accompanying over certainty (for amateur use).
Throwaway05
1d ago
Great Another AI Post.
On the front page of Meddit today is a post that basically goes "AI convinced my patient that eating toilet paper helps with constipation." This to my experience appears to be the norm.
In Medicine I've found AI to be of limited utility, because mistakes are not allowed and the required error checking usually nullifies productivity gains.
In Programming it seems to be hot shit because error checking is part of the job and required either way.
Other fields things get more complicated and I have less experience. But the usual people seem excited and the usual people seem frustrated.
So I want to know, for those of you who use AI for work outside of programming (and not to simplify tasks for hobbies/personal life) what are you actually using it for, how is it helping your discipline? I am endlessly fascinated by the immense gap between people who love it and hate it.
Also, for those of you who know a bit more about LLMs, the lack of true error correction seems to be a fundamental problem, is their any hope of this actually being addressed without completely changing away from LLMs?
Throwaway05
7d ago
I mean palliative care only provides meaningful benefit for some problems, many other patients would prefer their autonomy to be respected or are unable to establish their wishes because of the illness (or don't even have wishes).
Throwaway05
8d ago
It's not about fixing problems, it's about giving the sufferer the a quality of life better than being dead.
What I'm saying is that in a lot of these cases the drugs don't improve any quality of life or there is literally no quality of life.
These things also come with serious side effects.
It's not a good solution. Fentanyl is not Soma.
Throwaway05
8d ago
Pleasure causing drugs don't fix all problems, and for people who functionally don't have brains they aren't really doing much.
Throwaway05
8d ago
What about people who are functionally dead (like brain death) or people who were functionally never born (as is arguable in this case)?
Throwaway05
8d ago
IIRC the Floyd trial had juror intimidation. That was way more important and disruptive but nobody remembers it.
Throwaway05
11d ago
I would hazard a guess that the majority of healthcare workers have encountered a patient who experienced life altering injury, paralysis, and even death from a fall of two stories or less.
It's not certain, but it can easily and obviously be quite bad.
Throwaway05
13d ago
I disagree but only on the grounds that they were never doing anything before.
Throwaway05
13d ago
I really think this depends on what you are doing. For instance work that primarily involves relationships and interaction in meatspace? Unchanged. Physicians? Unchanged.
Ambient scribes are now common but they are of very poor quality, and in some specialities only replace low paid labor (ex: ED) instead of reducing work load. Poor choice for progress notes and admission notes, unnecessary for procedure notes, really the only thing AI helps with is hospital courses even then the edit process is going to be key because the reliability isn't there.
I should really do an effort post on this, but medicine is noticing and attempting to address never-skilling, mis-skilling and deskilling, which will absolutely be a problem in professional domains in the future (and is already a problem in education).
I agree with OP - yes we've seen some amazing feats but translators and cars still exist, both of which were promised to be replaced years and years ago.
Throwaway05
16d ago
One of the strongest surviving taboos in the Anglosphere is that white people should not say the gamer word.
You can say it if you are a white anti-ice protestor and the ICE agent is ethnic.
Be engaged in the right causes and you get a pass.
Throwaway05
16d ago
Being (seemingly) wrong does not mean something is crankish or bad science. This example was driven by psychology not psychiatry, an intuitive and reasonable guess given early and later findings about attachment theory, outside the time window I suggested (good evidence against start accumulation in the 70s), and was more or less deprecated with increasing latter evidence against.
Regular medicine, even more mechanistic things like cardiology, is wrong all the time. So is math.
Throwaway05
17d ago
To some extent I think this is desirable, it is up to the defense and prosecution to lay out these concepts and explain them to the jury. If they are convincing the jury acts accordingly.
Throwaway05
17d ago
The acceptance of deviance because continued opprobrium has become inconvenient doesn't sound much like science either. It wasn't deviant behavior because it was unaccepted. It was deviant because it failed to produce good outcomes.
This is a little bit of having it both ways, one of the ways the field attempts to manage issues with overs-diagnosis is by putting things in cultural context, for instance a core part of what makes something a psychiatric illness "does it negatively effect your life."
The line between a healthy person, a neurotic person, someone with obsessive compulsive personality disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder is in part of how maladaptive it is and how you feel about it.
This is also how you attempt to make sure ADHD, Anxiety, and Depression aren't over diagnosed. Feeling sad sometimes is part of the human experience. Feeling anxious to some extent is adaptive. Not being able to work and live your life because of sadness is pathology.
With homosexuality - if being gay means you are executed, it's much more fair to say that it is pathology adjacent, especially if that unlocks resources for support.
Pedophilia is also an example of something that is overwhelmingly the subject of cultural scorn, but it's wrongness is less to do with obvious organic brain injury and more to do with the fact that nobody thinks it is acceptable. In a different society (like the pederasty ancient societies) it's not pathology. Here and now it's a disease and acknowledging that allows people to get treatment and for the legal system to do its thing when people act.
Throwaway05
18d ago
Search on YouTube for "Lindsay Clancy Trial: Forensic Psychiatrist Explains Psychosis, Malingering, & Insanity Defense."
No direct link because I remember hearing something about YouTube links showing the account source and I'm too lazy to figure that out.
Thanks!
More options
Context Copy link