I've heard a lot of such anecdotes. I'm not saying its ill-intentioned, but the skeptic in me is cautious that this is the type of reasoning which propels the anti-vax movement.

I wish / hope the medical community will address stories like this before people lose trust in them entirely. How frequent are mis-diagnosis like this? How often is "user research" helping or hurting the process of getting good health outcomes? Are there medical boards that are sending PSAs to help doctors improve common mis-diagnosis? Whats the role of LLMs in all of this?

Since someone else asked and you said you didn't remember, do you think he may have had Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH)? And the surgery which he had may have been a VP shunt (ventricular-peritoneal) -- something to move fluid away from his brain?

Quite a mouthful for the layman and the symptoms you are describing would fit. NPH has one of my favorite mnemonic in medicine for students learning about the condition, describing the hallmark symptoms as: "Wet, Wobbly and Wacky."

Wet referring to urinary incontinence, Wobbly referring to ataxia/balance issues and Wacky referring to encephalopathy (which could mimic dementia symptoms).

That's a tip I recommend people to try when they are using LLMs to solve stuff. Instead of asking "how to..", ask "what alternatives are there to...". A top-k answer is way better, and you get to engage more with whatever you are trying to learn/solve.

General doctors aren't trained for problem solving, they're trained for memorization. The doctors that are good at problem solving aren't general doctors.

Glad to hear your uncle improved! Would you mind sharing the other two hypotheses and what the diagnosis ultimately was?

Thanks for sharing. I struggled with long-term undiagnosed issues for so long. It took me 15 years of trying with doctors until one did a colonoscopy and found an H.Pylori infection in 2018. Prescribed the right kind of antibiotics and changed my life. In hindsight, my symptoms matched many of the infection's. No doctor figured it out.

So many doctors never bothered to conduct any tests. Many said it's in my head. Some told me to just exercise. I tried general doctors, specialists. At some point, I was so desperate that I went to homeopathy route.

15 years wasted. Why did it take 15 years for the current system?

I'd bet that if I had ChatGPT earlier, it could have helped me in figuring out the issue much faster. When you're sick, you don't give a damn who might have your health data. You just want to get better.

A cause that needs surgery is readily diagnosed with a Brain MRI. If the doctor didn't order one after symptoms of "balance and slurred speech" then it's not a success of AI but a lethal negligence of the doctor. AI is a substitute for bad doctors not (yet) for good ones.

I can give you the exact opposite anecdote for myself. Spent weeks with Dr Google and one or another LLMs (few years ago so not current SOTA) describing myself and getting like 10 wrong possibilities. Took my best guess with me to a doctor who listened to me babble for 5 minutes and immediately gave me a correct diagnosis of a condition I had not remotely considered. Problem was most likely that I was not accurately describing my symptoms because it was difficult to put it into words. But also I was probably priming queries with my own expected (and mistaken) outcomes. Not sure if current models would have done a better job, but in my case at least, a human doctor was far superior.

That story says a lot about where the gaps really are. Most doctors aren’t lacking raw intelligence, they’re just crushed for time and constrained by whatever diagnostic playbook their clinic rewards. A chatbot isn’t magic insight, it’s just the only “colleague” people can brainstorm with for as long as they need. In your uncle’s case it nudged the GP out of autopilot and back into actual differential diagnosis. I’d love a world where physicians get protected time and incentives to do that kind of broader reasoning without a patient having to show up with a print‑out from Gemini, but until then these tools are becoming the second opinion patients can actually obtain.

what was the second diagnosis?

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