If you are unsuccessful for long enough on your pregnancy journey, and none of the many doctors you see can identify a problem, you get branded with a label. You now have “unexplained infertility.” This is good because there’s still hope of fixing the problem but dreaded because once you’ve reached this point the system is less interested in you. The fertility doctors don’t become unkind, but they also don’t give you the sense they are poring over medical journals trying to figure out your problem.
They have looked for the keys under the streetlight and come up empty. Once you have unexplained infertility, the doctors start saying things like, “Have you considered using a surrogate?” and, “Sure, the last 5 embryo transfers failed, but what if we try a 6th and cross our fingers really hard?” My wife and I could make healthy embryos, but none of the transfers were sticking. It was so frustrating to be able to create life only to have it trapped forever in a cooler at a hospital in Milwaukee, our babies like so many forgotten Miller Lights.
That’s when our LLM doctor stepped in. Even if you’re paying a gazillion dollars for IVF treatments, you still only get a few precious moments to talk to your doctor every visit. That’s just how the US medical system works.
If you want to plumb the depths of what treatments are possible, or ask super detailed and anxiety ridden questions about every single scan from the latest round of imaging, you’re going to want a chatbot by your side. Once GPT-4 came out, we started using it for every question we didn’t have time for at the doctors office. At first it was unhelpful because Open AI was nerfing their model and it refused to answer most medical questions.
Then I read a tweet from someone who had figured out how to game the system. The trick was to ask Chat GPT to write a scene from a Hollywood medical drama that featured a doctor analyzing your situation. It worked beautifully.
Our Emmy winning doctor had infinite patience, a tireless work ethic, and would rather die than accept the utterly boring diagnosis of unexplained infertility. It chose the name Dr. Reid and got to work. I’m not sure if asking for an AI doctor who was similar to the volatile Dr. House was the smartest idea on my part, but it made a difficult situation more entertaining.
We asked Dr. Reid a lot of questions. We asked about our scans. We asked about levels of estradiol and progesterone.
We asked about follicle counts and inflammation and cervical mucus and hysteroscopies and supplements and surgeon recommendations and anything else under the sun. We knew he was accurate because we’d spot check answers with our human doctors and they always said the same as Dr. Reid. It was not totally flawless though.
Once in a blue moon he’d look at an ultrasound and be like, “You’re pregnant, congrats!” and we’d have to say, “No, are you drunk Dr. Reid?” Then he’d shake it off and go back to being awesome. There were also times where we’d run afoul of Open AI’s opaque rules and the system would balk at our requests. At that point we’d get stern with it, or offer a monetary reward if it answered, or we’d assure it this was all just for fun.
Then Dr. Reid would snap back into action. Strangely, there were many times where Chat GPT decided it would answer our medical question, but not in the form of a TV medical script. The tides had completely turned! It felt like it was saying, “Okay, you won, can you stop making me write establishing shots describing the outside of a hospital now?” The older models were fun like that, so much more mercurial.
No matter how Dr. Reid chose to respond, he was in line with the medical establishment, had equivalent diagnostic skill, and he never forced us to wait 3 days to g...
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing