alt Hacker NewsI get where you’re coming from. I would argue the mistakes doctors make and the amount of times they are wrong literally dwarfs the amount of anti vaxers in existence.
Also the anti vax movement isn’t completely wrong. It’s now confirmed (officially) that the covid-19 vaccine isn’t completely safe and there are risks taking it that don’t exist in say something like the flu shot. The risk is small but very real and quite deadly. Source: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/12/myocarditis-v... This was something many many doctors originally claimed was completely safe.
The role of LLMs is they take the human bias out of the picture. They are trained on formal medical literature and actual online anecdotal accounts of patients who will take a shit on doctors if need be (the type of criticism a doctor rarely gets in person). The generalization that comes from these two disparate sets of data is actually often superior to a doctor.
Key word is “often”. Less often (but still often in general) the generalization can be an hallucination.
Your post irked me because I almost got the sense that there’s a sort of prestige, admiration and respect given to doctors that in my opinion is unearned. Doctors in my opinion are like car mechanics and that’s the level of treatment they deserve. They aren’t universally good, a lot of them are shitty, a lot are manipulative and there’s a lot of great car mechanics I respect as well. That’s a fair outlook they deserve… but instead I see them get these levels of respect that matches mother Theresa as if they devoted their careers to saving lives and not money.
No one and I mean no one should trust the medical establishment or any doctor by default. They are like car mechanics and should be judged on a case by case basis.
You know for the parent post, how much money do you think those fucking doctors got to make a wrong diagnosis of dementia? Well over 700 for less than an hour of there time. And they don’t even have the kindness to offer the patient a refund for incompetence on their part.
How much did ChatGPT charge?
> This was something many many doctors originally claimed was completely safe.
I never heard any doctors claim any of the covid vaccines were completely safe. Do you mind if I ask which doctors, exactly? Not institutions, not vibes, not headlines. Individual doctors. Medicine is not a hive mind, and collapsing disagreement, uncertainty, and bad messaging into “many doctors” is doing rhetorical work that the evidence has to earn.
> The role of LLMs is they take the human bias out of the picture.
That is simply false. LLMs are trained on human writing, human incentives, and human errors. They can weaken certain authority and social pressures, which is valuable, but they do not escape bias. They average it. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it produces very confident nonsense.
> Your post irked me because I almost got the sense that there’s a sort of prestige, admiration and respect given to doctors that in my opinion is unearned. Doctors in my opinion are like car mechanics and that’s the level of treatment they deserve.
> No one and I mean no one should trust the medical establishment or any doctor by default. They are like car mechanics and should be judged on a case by case basis.
You are entitled to that opinion, but I wanted to kiss the surgeon who removed my daughter’s gangrenous appendix. That reaction was not to their supposed prestige, it was recognition that someone applied years of hard won skill correctly at a moment where failure had permanent consequences.
Doctors make mistakes. Some are incompetent. Some are cynical. None of that justifies treating the entire profession as functionally equivalent to a trade whose failures usually cost money rather than lives.
And if doctors are car mechanics, then patients are machines. That framing strips the humanity from all of us. That is nihilism.
No one should trust doctors by default. Agreed. But no one should distrust them by default either. Judgment works when it is applied case by case, not when it is replaced with blanket contempt.