A few years ago (before the AI craze), I was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis. I had a chronic cough, and an outsourced radiologist at a clinic found signs of tuberculosis. The findings were sent to the city's tuberculosis hospital, as required by the country's law. The doctors there took the radiologist's conclusion at face value and required me to stay at their hospital for at least 8 months under a strict, prison-like regime. There was no option to say no, because I was considered some kind of biohazard, and by law I had to comply.
Before I was admitted, I quickly found another radiologist, who diagnosed pneumonia instead. I sent his report to the chief doctor at the tuberculosis hospital, and after some deliberation they concluded that the original reading was wrong. Turns out the doctors there can't read scans at all and just believe whatever a radiologist says...
The funny thing is, they had already officially put me on the tuberculosis register and didn't want to admit they had made a mistake. So instead, they simply gave me another paper saying that I had been cured of tuberculosis by them... in 7 days. I'm probably the only person in the country to defeat tuberculosis in a week :)
So if you don't trust the radiologist/doctor, maybe find another doctor if you can afford it? You can compare their conclusions and see if they match. Two unrelated doctors or radiologists saying the same thing is probably about as close to the truth as you're going to get. I'm not sure though whether I should trust AI or humans more. AI can hallucinate, but I've been misdiagnosed by humans so many times too...
Yeah, I know! It was strange. They gave me a test, and it came back negative, but they insisted it was negative because I had "latent tuberculosis," which supposedly wasn't detectable by the test yet but was about to become active.
I forgot to mention that, besides getting a second opinion from another radiologist, I also took a more modern test at another private clinic. That test has better detection rates than the one the state clinic used, and it came back negative too.
I have suspicions they had some kind of government quota to keep the hospital staffed with patients in order to receive funding. Or they were just completely incompetent. I pushed back by bringing them another radiologist's report and the results of a better test that I paid for myself, so I guess they decided to back down.
Some countries and jurisdictions still have laws that allow for the involuntary confinement of tuberculosis patients, I guess dating back to the times when tuberculosis was rampant in those countries? And most professionals seem to be okay with the policy:
>17% said that, as a matter of principle, the involuntary incarceration of TB patients was inappropriate on any grounds.
>Regionally, members from Europe Region had the highest percentage of respondents objecting to the policy as a matter of principle (26.2%) while the North America Region had the lowest (3%).
The emergence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in the 1990s is probably one of the reasons:
>Respondents most strongly supported the policy of incarceration for patients known to have multidrug-resistant TB (49.7%)
Because it’s a nasty disease, and they’d like to prevent its spread. A quarter of the world may have TB, but there are only like 10,000 cases in the US every year
Well you can't diagnose pyelonephritis without a urine culture as well, which my GP kindly noted after I already took a full 14 day dosis of antibiotics. The ER I was at before tried to, anyway.
Yea I find a lot of stories on the web about doctors misdiagnosing things to have oddities like this that don't seem to make sense. It often seems like the author is leaving something out. Not saying OP is lying, but tb is a very, very weird conclusion to come to from just one radiology report...
See my answer in this same subthread. I was perplexed myself as to why I was diagnosed based on just one radiology report. But the moral of my story is that you can always try to obtain a second opinion from another doctor. I'm not saying doctors shouldn't be trusted in general.
I had a similar experience. My son had pneumonia and was still filling pain after 10 days of antibiotics. Took an X-Ray to three different doctors, and only one got the right diagnosis (pleural effusion). It's really something we should have a central place with top notch professionals looking at it, instead having each doctor to find by themselves.
I once worked on a medical hackathon concept for computer-assisted population screening for cervical cancer in a developing nation. Community health workers take photos. The AI would look at the images, and make a call of "clearly negative" vs "clearly positive" vs "needs (scarce) expert review". But taking good photos is hard, so it's also "photos insufficient" and "worker needs additional mentorship on taking photos". Only by computes reducing all three costs - expert workload, exam success, and quality-control/training - might successful deployment be financially and logistically plausible for that nation.
A second opinion is a smart move if one has doubts about their diagnosis. Doctors make mistakes, and even though I've worked with countless great doctors, I've never worked a job where there wasn't at least one who was undiscerning, or downright lazy and negligent. It's hard to tell people to trust their doctor when I know there are plenty of doctors out there like this.
But AI as of right now is worse than any bad doctor I've ever worked with.
The healthcare affordability crisis is only going to exacerbate the trend of using AI as a replacement for a real doctor. I went to urgent care a few months ago to get tested for COVID and two other flu strains and it came out to almost $500.
Anecdotally, several people in my life who embrace less traditional (and sometimes more conspiratorial) views on modern healthcare tend to be the ones that can't afford it. A confident-sounding chatbot to answer questions day and night about what's going on with your body is very seductive in a world where access to real healthcare is getting further and further out of reach.
That's the balance I'm finding it very hard to strike when talking to my family about doctors.
Everyone is either a "all doctors are scams" QAnon type, or they blindly trust everything their doctor says, no matter how fishy, in fear of coming off as one of the former group.
And, to use a phrase we all hate by now, you're absolutely right. When most people have to go into debt to even see a doctor, what can people possibly conclude from that besides "all doctors are out to scam you?"
> AI can hallucinate, but I've been misdiagnosed by humans so many times too...
I've heard this experience from quite a few folks before, but this is my first time hearing about a mandatory 8 months quarantine as a consequence... damn
> I had been cured of tuberculosis by them... in 7 days
Just FYI that might suck in the future. Some countries might deny you entry / visa, or at least require expensive additional screening if you had tuberculosis diagnosed in the past. It might be worth to fight this.
Your TB stories made me recall my (fond) TB stories. I came from a country that requires tuberculosis vaccines as a school-entry requirement. I have the vaccine and antibodies. Then moved to a country that didn't have this requirement but I had to be tested to make sure I didn't have TB for things like camps, college, etc. The test is something like a vaccine that injects only dead TB cells, if the injection site welts up from anti-bodies then you had to get another whole panel of tests (like X-ray of lungs). Thankfully I've never had it but TB is apparently no joke. Though blasting my chest with radiation is no healthier :p
Before I was admitted, I quickly found another radiologist, who diagnosed pneumonia instead. I sent his report to the chief doctor at the tuberculosis hospital, and after some deliberation they concluded that the original reading was wrong. Turns out the doctors there can't read scans at all and just believe whatever a radiologist says...
The funny thing is, they had already officially put me on the tuberculosis register and didn't want to admit they had made a mistake. So instead, they simply gave me another paper saying that I had been cured of tuberculosis by them... in 7 days. I'm probably the only person in the country to defeat tuberculosis in a week :)
So if you don't trust the radiologist/doctor, maybe find another doctor if you can afford it? You can compare their conclusions and see if they match. Two unrelated doctors or radiologists saying the same thing is probably about as close to the truth as you're going to get. I'm not sure though whether I should trust AI or humans more. AI can hallucinate, but I've been misdiagnosed by humans so many times too...