A woman who was accused of faking her debilitating illness has died at 33
www.independent.co.uk
Her condition, caused by gene mutations, was blamed baselessly on psychiatric issues

Aston sought medical help after her symptoms—which included severe migraines, abdominal pain, joint dislocations, easy bruising, iron deficiency, fainting, tachycardia, and multiple injuries—began in 2015, per the New Zealand Herald. She was referred to Auckland Hospital, where a doctor accused her of causing her own illness. Because of his accusations, Aston was placed on psychiatric watch. 

Research suggests women are often much more likely to be misdiagnosed than men. A 2009 study of patients with heart disease symptoms found 31.3 per cent of middle-aged women “received a mental health condition as the most certain diagnosis”, compared to just 15.6 per cent of their male counterparts. Additionally, a 2020 study found that as many as 75.2 per cent of patients with endometriosis—a painful disorder that affects the tissue of the uterus—had been misdiagnosed after they started experiencing endometriosis symptoms. Among those women, nearly 50 per cent were told they had a “mental health problem”.

  • _number8_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    721·
    10 months ago

    it’s also so stupid that AI constantly chides you for asking it medical advice. yeah god forbid i want to use the free, ostensibly super intelligent tool instead of making an appointment, going there, talking to the guy who may also be wrong anyway, and paying hundreds

    • merridewOPEnglish
      33·
      10 months ago

      If you are talking about ChatGPT: please do not do this.

      ChatGPT guesses which words should come next in a sequence, based on its training data and your prompt. It is not intelligent, and it has no concept of what is real and what is not. It will cheerfully make things up.

      I sympathise with your frustration at having to pay money to see a doctor. I can’t imagine how stressful life would be without the NHS.

    • themusicman@lemmy.worldEnglish
      26·
      10 months ago

      No current AI is super intelligent. As a software developer who has been keeping up to date with AI progress, I can say with some certainty that AI is far more biased in its diagnoses than human doctors and will often be misled by subtle changes in wording. I strongly urge you to not rely on medical advice from any current AI.

    • Altan1903@kbin.social
      81·
      10 months ago

      It will not be free, and it will misdiagnose exactly the same way as a human doctor would.
      I’d argue that what Saraphim described, -their friend dying from being constantly misdiagnosed due to weight- is the perfect example of what we will be able expect from an AI doctor. These machine learning algorithms lack fidelity, which is most needed to understand a complex problem.
      Furthermore they have no concept of ethics or morals, and the data they train on reflects the imperfections of our society.
      So for example if all the doctors are biased towards overweight women, the AI trained on their diagnostic data will be too.

      AI doesnt exist but will ruin everything anyways

      One day AI will be a useful tool but to get there, one of the things we must do is be very critical of it.

    • Laticauda@lemmy.caEnglish
      41·
      10 months ago

      There isn’t a publicly available ai for medical issues (and even assuming there ever will be, it won’t be for a long long time) so if you’re asking any of the publicly accessible ai for medical advice then I’m sorry but that is clinically stupid. And any medical based ai that currently exists is going to be very flawed in various ways, and no better than a human, probably worse in a lot of ways, hence why we don’t use them on a widespread basis.

      Also current “ai” isn’t super intelligent by any metric, they’re just specialized algorithms. We don’t have the kind of sci fi AI you see in movies yet, we only have narrow AI atm, which are just pattern recognition learning algorithms, they don’t mimic a human thought process.