The second opinion advice is great, and what I tell everyone I know who gets cancer.
My mom was diagnosed with stage 1 cancer in 2006 in Idaho. I was a PhD student at MIT at the time and a friend in lab helped me get an appointment at Dana-Farber. I thought it was probably overkill (it was a common cancer) but we did it anyway. They said everything in Idaho was standard of care but suggested one extra test, which Idaho team then reluctantly did, which revealed distant metastasis (stage 4! ), dramatically changing her treatment trajectory. She lived another 15 years (I miss you Mom).
Asking for a second opinion sucks. A lot of us are preconditioned from birth to trust our clinicians. But you're going on a journey and your life (or the life of your loved one) is on the line. Insurance often covers it. Your doctor will NOT be offended.
Think of it this way : if you were deploying code to the mars rover, and your colleague asked to do a code review before you pushed go, would you be offended? This is even more important than that.
Other story, for balance: My father was diagnosed (again, in Idaho) with a rare ocuclar melanoma. Very few cases, but highly treatable. The specialist was in SF where I lived at the time. We went there, and it was a very different experience from Dana-Farber. The clinician was an academic who only saw patients like once a week. People were sitting on the floor lined up out the door.
His staff was gruff, there was such limited information as we progressed through the system, there were so many patients there from all over the western part of the US. For many of them it was their first time with cancer, and sitting there in the waiting room with my (non-medical!!!) bio training my Dad would often offer my services to "explain" something. Which I did, and I think I helped, but it was all rough.
The main doctor was so gruff and obnoxious that I emailed my MD friends in Boston (was still in grad school) asking how I could file a complaint.
But at the end of the day that process helped my father (and many of those other people ) get state-of-the-art proton beam therapy, covered by insurance.
Sadly my dad's cancer came back a short time later and he passed away (miss you too Dad).
But now, 15 years later, having been through the healthcare system in so many ways, and having many friends who are academic specialist MDs, I recognize that the doctor in SF was operating with incredible constraints, finite resources, and probably tired. And my Dad got the best possible treatment technology as a result of the second opinion.
But at the time I wanted to strangle the doctor.
I'm writing this just to say that sometimes the second opinion is tough. Sometimes it's in a far-away place or the doctors are jerks. Maybe even borderline unprofessional. They're the bastard operator from hell in their own little world. But again, this is life-and-death.
GET THAT SECOND OPINION EVEN IF THE DOCTOR IS A DICK.
Yeah absolutely on the 2nd opinion, my dad went into his GP and said “I think I have lung cancer”, after a period of difficulty breathing and low energy. The GP diagnosed him with low iron and gave him some iron supplements, didn’t even get a scan. A few months later he had to have a couple of litres of fluid drained from his lungs while on holiday, turned out to be mesothelioma. Obviously we’d prefer it to be low iron, but better to know what is going on and be able to respond to it.
To the doctor you're getting the second opinion from, don't tell them the first opinion right off the bat until you've heard the second opinion. This to not put them in a position where they feel any pressure whatsoever to agree or disagree to the first. You want their own uninfluenced opinion. Afterwards, yes, you can tell them the first opinion, so they can give their separate opinion on that.
Yes because everyone will want to share records / data. The specialized clinics / centers are used to this role! Especially if you are going from a more-generic to a more-specialized center, but even if you're walking down the street.
This is literally life-and-death. My recommendation is for full transparency, it was crucial for us.
The only people who trust clinicians are people who haven't been through the healthcare system. There's the before time and after time. It changes you. Every field has good people, bad people and mediocre people. Doctors are no different.
Anyway, I would say I actually had relatively positive experience with Thyroid cancer. I had been seeing my Endo for 10 years at that point since I had hypothyroidism. His nurse was on top of everything. Very calm and reassuring during the whole process.
But all my experiences with the healthcare system outside of that were just disappointing. I had RCVS 2 years ago and I was in the ER and the radiologist summarized the report wrong even though he has read it correctly. They were starting me on stroke protocol and giving me these drugs but I had ChatGPT read it and it was like this is wrong. It's supposed to say no significant stenosis in the neck. It actually said significant stenosis in the neck. The dr reported it immediately and the radiologist corrected it. What a shit show. No one could even give me a straight answer on if I could go back to exercising or when I can get off a medication. Every doctor I saw was completely different. Have a few other stories like that pre LLM's. But you have to advocate for yourself. And always double check the doctors with LLM's now a days.
Even the great doctors make mistakes. As a patient, you know your history front to back, but doctors can forget or miss even basic details. They tend to have little time for each patient, so I understand how it happens. You have to continually pay attention, correct people and make sure to accurately describe everything you know. Be a pain in the butt, do a ton of your own research, and ask ask ask ask ask.
I was with you right up until your last sentence. Absolutely get a second opinion for any diagnosis that you deem warranted, but putting your healthcare decisions in the hands of an LLM is not the route I'd be suggesting to anyone.
I read it more charitably. Double check with the LLM because it is pretty good a lot of the time and might uncover some useful insights or oversights. Don't blindly trust what it says, definitely, but use what you get from it to guide further inquiry from reputable sources.
My suggestion is that if you're within a 2-3 hour drive of major cancer centers - just use the US News list https://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/rankings/cancer - go there instead of your local community hospital. The top cancer hospitals in the world accept your health insurance (probably), so why not go there? Use your vacations days, book hotels if you have to - this is the time to go all out.
My experience: I was horribly sick for 10 months, none of my local doctors could figure it out, then I drove to Penn Medicine in Philadelphia and they did the right labwork in the first visit. These top centers just have different mindset than your community hospitals.
Really good advice! There are so many benefits of the big centers, the largest one being speed. At MD Anderson I got a question answered within 20 minutes of my visit to a Dr that happened by him calling the pathologist. If that wasn't at a cancer center, it would have take days, or more likely, the question never would have been answered at all.
Record keeping is a good idea for any medical thing.
Quite a lot of serious medical things start out seeming not serious, including a lot of cancers. Basically once an ailment seems unusual, like “hmm this is not going away like usual,” start writing down every time, date, and detail you can remember back to when it started. Then keep that current.
Doing this will help the accuracy of your treatment.
There are also a bunch of implicit “timers” in standards of care, like take OTC drugs and rest for a week, then come back if it is still not resolved. Having a detailed precise timeline documented can help skip through those. The doctor may be able to look at the detail and say “ok you’ve already tried the easy fixes, let’s dig deeper.”
Had a family member recently go through unexpected major surgery.
One thing I would mention:
You are not dealing with a monolithic entity with regards to a hospital.
There are really multiple groups with oftentimes competing interests e.g.
- case manager wants you out and home b/c that is the best "score" for the hospital. They also DO NOT want you to qualify for Medicare if you are a senior b/c, again, "score" gets dinged if Medicare gets involved
- surgeons want you out as they don't want you to pick up hospital infection. They want you to go to a rehab facility as that will more likely lead to a good outcome
- the hospitalist wants you to be stable in the short term so will pump you with whatever medications are necessary to get you "back to normal" without addressing any root cause
- the nurses generally care about you as a person as they deal with you the most but oftentimes have the least amount of say over your case
- in one of those perverse incentives/unintended consequences: if you do TOO well on a physical ability test, that might disqualify you from certain coverage even if you are below the threshold on other ability tests. That can have gigantic insurance implications.
This is prompting me to write my own version of the OP blog post.
The first point is by far the most important. The US healthcare system (and probably others) is an unfeeling machine and you have to treat it that way. Ask for earlier appointments, cancellations, and referrals to other specialists. Navigate it as if nobody knows (or cares) what you're up to. Doctors tend to only exist within their silo and it's often on you to request a different type of doctor or even another one of the same type. Be a pain in the ass, your survival may depend on it.
Personal story: I was having trouble using my left arm. Like, couldn't lift or type or do much of anything with it. Was told it was a pinched nerve by physiatrists and orthopedists, despite having no pain. Only when I specifically requested for a referral to a second neurologist did he order the head MRI which exposed a brain tumor in my motor cortex. We were able to move quickly and get me on a treatment plan which has bought me a lot of time. Had I not advocated for myself, it would have probably mutated into a much worse type and killed me soon.
I became close friends with a doctor over the past couple years and she's an extremely caring and diligent person. Truly wonderful went into it for the right reasons.
By all accounts is amazing to her patients, but god the amount of work thrown at a PCP and the deluge of emails and just how little life the system gives you (at least while in residency, I guess I'll see what happens after)... like I have to imagine our care could be so much better if we weren't trying to optimize the system and had more resources.
My mom is a teacher and it's similar there, she loves kids so much and after a few decades she absolutely cannot wait to be done. She was excellent at the start of her career and got kudos from absolutely everyone but now she's just getting by until retirement because she can't take it anymore.
I had to quite literally sit in a doctor's office and make a public nuisance of myself to get a referral for a family member to a specialist for cancer when the regular doctor said it was just back pain. Then I drove the 2 hours to their office to get the appointment. It was lymphoma.
People can't ignore you as effectively if you're in their physical space. When it comes to your health or the health of your family, do not back down. Doctors are used to nuts who googled the symptoms or joined a Facebook group and have all the answers already. Make it clear you have NO answers but NEED them asap.
I've had similar experiences. It's kind of terrifying, actually, you have to walk the line of being annoying enough to get what you want but not so annoying they completely ignore you.
One of the things I've learned is to apply the Socratic method, preferably in front of their colleagues if they try to brush you off. Also, if you've got scary symptoms, demand they write down what your symptoms are on your record and why they aren't concerned, then demand a copy of all relevant records (it's your property) -- this often gets them to reevaluate your risk in terms of their career.
Worst case scenario, you can make up medical history. I had a family member pass recently from colorectal cancer. They had symptoms but their PCP kept insisting they were too young. My family member suddenly "remembered" her aunt died of CRC when she was a kid. This got her referred to a gastroenterologist, and they found out she was stage 4...after her PCP delayed her diagnosis for like a year. She actually had grounds for a malpractice suit but who's got the energy or money for that when they're fighting stage 4 cancer?
Also, know your state's agency responsible for policing health insurance. This family member's insurance company routinely tried to deny life saving procedures, but a call to the right govt agency set them in line each time.
This is something I don't understand of the US and other "developed" countries health systems.
Here in Mexico, i can get to doctoralia and make an appointment with a high specialist , like a Vascular Neurosurgeon. All by myself. The first visit will to maybe $200 usd (and that's very high) and normally it's a week away at most. No waiting on the private health option.
Of course if you go with public health, it's a disaster and a shame.
What other countries describe is the equivalent of your public health system. If you're willing to pay out of pocket, like you describe, you can have a similar experience in the US. However, that can get expensive quickly since you normally don't have just one appointment with a vascular neurosurgeon.
But the thing is that paying out of pocket would be very expensive in the "developed" countries.
The advantage of the less developed countries is that you can get pretty good private medical care for a reasonably price. The quality may not match the very best care available in the rich countries, but in many cases, it is adequate.
I have a similar but more benign story, and cannot emphasize enough how correct this comment is. I had severe abdominal pain and vomiting. My PCP told me it was GERD and I should lose weight. Two days later I was getting an emergency cholecystectomy because my gall bladder had necrotized.
A good shorthand is that unless a doctor has positively identified something through imaging or biopsy do not trust them when they tell you what something is or what to do about it.
If you aren't sure how best to advocate for yourself, use AI to help figure out what tests and referrals to ask for. You might feel like a jerk, but don't expect anyone to care about you more than you do.
Been gone through something similar. It's important to be persistent.
My PET-CT was originally scheduled for 6 weeks, and they couldn't get it sooner. I had to call every imaging labs within 50-100 miles radius, eventually got one within the next couple of days.
The next important one is to find the best doctor you could afford. I didn't have a lot of faith on my local oncologist, especially when he said that my cancer (nasopharyngeal carcinoma) is rare and had not much experience with it.
I was able to get ahold of the chief surgeon at UCSF, purely by luck. Felt a lot better when he said that this type of cancer is pretty common for south-asian descent. He has dealt with it quite often due to a large concentration of asian in the bay area.
The treatment sucks, but small price to pay considering I can spend more time with my family.
If you've dealt with the American medical system then stories like this aren't very surprising. I'm not going to act like this is everyone's story (a lot of people have pretty smooth experiences) but it happens a lot more often than it should.
It's not unique to America. Specialists are in high demand everywhere and seeing them means you have to pass through a screen of generalists who first rule out all the common explanations for your symptoms.
But GP's point is otherwise true. It's just a job to them. They see dozens of sick people every day. There's no way to be empathetically engaged with all of them or really any of them and still be effective. It's not personal, and they aren't ignoring you. You're a bug report in their ticket system. Understand that and you'll be able to deal with the system more effectively.
If you have halfway decent insurance in the US you do not need a referral to see a specialist.
The exception to this rule is if you are in an HMO like Kaiser which force you through "level one support" (your GP) or if the specialist is so busy they require a referral to screen out the social media schizos.
Yes. They don't have time to deal with hypochondriacs who just show up. Unless you are an existing patient asking for followup, or have a referral, many will not schedule you or will maybe give you an appointent six months from now.
The number one thing I tell anyone who is going through any sort of medical situation that requires extensive care, you have to be the biggest advocate for your care. If youre not comfortable doing that, then find a loved one who will stand by your side and be that person. Healthcare is a business and you need to treat it with the same vigor you tackle business problems because your issue is a business problem to them.
Don’t forget, Doctors are just well read mechanics
I had a heart condition (myocarditis) recently after a viral episode, despite the obvious prognosis the ER doctor treated me for a heart attack instead without consulting a cardiologist which sent me to the ICU.
I should have mistrusted the doctor and trusted the AIs more, unless they gave me compelling reasoning. Don’t give up your decisions to anyone, incompetence is abound.
It's worse everywhere else. There are no specialists in all of the government-run systems I've dealt with and at some point, you really have no options left.
It's an over generalization but think this person has a point. The US health system has it problems (cost!!), but have read that since it's money driven instead of a government service, compared to other healthcare systems, it's often got a shorter wait time to see a doctor. This makes sense, a lot of students want to become doctors in the US, because they can make a lot of money
I feel like the >(cost!!) factor can't really be overstated there. IF you have money then you can get healthcare, if you don't, then you're out of luck. It's a massive gate which needs to be passed, and if you can't pass, then you're locked out with no alternative.
That doesn't sound great to me (read: broken), because it means its not evenly accessible across your society. I wouldn't count that as a good system to be honest.
I have limited experience with the New Zealand and Japanese medical systems, and from a similarly arms-length engagement with them, I think I would prefer them over everything I've read about the US system. You still have the same issues with having to advocate for yourself, but you can at least get access to good healthcare across the board - and if you go private (which as a late 30s / early 40s guy, cost around NZ$60 / month), you can get access to care at private facilities much faster than via public.
It is most definitely imperfect, but it _is_ designed to be accessible to everyone.
I explored specializing in health econ in college. My professor put it this way - health care is a scarce good. There's only so many doctors, so much medicine, so many beds. You have to control access to the goods somehow, otherwise you have Tragedy of the Commons.
In the rest of the world, it's controlled by extended wait times. In the US, it's cost. You can have moral arguments about what's fair, but that's the economic reality.
At the time I as studying this (early 2010's), the average wait time of diagnosis to first treatment for breast cancer in the US was 12 days. In NIH, it was 5 months.
You read that where? What evidence do you have? In my experience, Americans are often blissfully unaware about how poor their health services are.
As someone who has seen many health services up close (from founding a health tech company and literally visiting myriad health establishments around the world, over the past few decades), the US hospitals and clinics always struck me as the most run down. But as soon as I walked in the boardroom at UHG or HCA, it suddenly all became a lot more glamorous.
And whilst the US does ok with cancer outcomes, so do other nations like Germany, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Most advanced nations have universal healthcare with similar outcomes to the US, but for significantly less money. They also don’t leave citizens destitute for having the unmitigated gall to impose an unexpected health emergency on themselves.
The US system funnels profit, it doesn’t provide better healthcare.
just lost my mom in law with a multi year battle with cancer. she was very proactive with her health as this article describes.
it's also important to remember that modern medicine, as wonderful as it is, is still limited. your particular type may have x lines of treatment, the cancer eventually mutates, your body can't handle the latter / harsher treatments, and...that's it.
Definitely get the second opinion, examine all the options, find the open minded doctor, potentially try an experimental treatment. That's all good. But there's a certain piece you or anyone can't control, and it's worth sitting with that too. That no matter what you might do, you might still end up at the end much sooner than you want to. My MIL's 5 year prognosis was awful, and she passed between 3 & 4 years.
But there's a CHANCE you might not and you might beat it, or at least live longer than expected. And even if you don't, you will pass knowing you did everything you reasonably could given the state of medicine today. Both of those are worth fighting for.
And make sure you have somebody around that will pay attention to changes in symptoms. My MIL almost died earlier this year because everyone thought her declining symptoms were the cancer. Turns out it was just too much calcium, once they treated she got a few extra months. She likely would've lived longer had they all caught it earlier.
Is there adverse selection in reports of the callousness, incompetence and greed of US healthcare providers?
Three years ago, of necessity I became a big-time consumer of healthcare[1] and I can't believe I just been lucky that nearly all my doctors seemed reasonable and effectively treated me. Of the dozen or so doctors I dealt with only one left me with a bad feeling.
[1] Stage 4 renal cancer, successfully treated with immunotherapy and surgery at Perlmutter Cancer Center in NYC.
This is fantastic. Thanks for posting it, JJ. There's a very strong chance you'll save n>0 lives by posting this.
Minor addition: When you talk to someone who has undergone the surgery, try to find someone that's a similar age and in similar shape to you, otherwise you may get wildly varying answers.
You'll respond, experience and heal from a surgery quite differently at 40 vs 50.
The late Jake Seliger and his widow Bess blogged at length about their experience navigating the medical system after his squamous cell cancer diagnosis. That was in 2023-25 though.
This is so grim. Why is this a list of things you need to worry about?
I had testicular cancer a decade ago (in Ireland). I found a lump, went to my GP, had a scan 2 days later, and surgery 12 later. Followed by chemo and a RPNLD as was needed.
I didn’t need to chase any doctors, I trusted every doctor I met (had I had AI then I wouldn’t have wasted time with them).
I got a second opinion, because why not, but they agreed with my onc.
Is this some very US coded list that isn’t relevant to my experiences in Ireland?
ps. I’m not sure why genetic testing is suggested here?
> If surgery is recommended, I would try and talk to someone who has undergone the surgery. I did not do this and regret it.
This applies to all surgery.
The medical system uses coarse statistics, like "did the condition go away" and "did the patient survive".
"The patient went through a devastatingly painful 9 months and slowly recovered over the course of years to work towards a small improvement in the original symptom" may be classified as a success.
And don't forget that many actors in the system are financially incentivized to recommend interventions.
This article is very relevant to me. Just this last Sunday I watched my mother die of melanoma.
My big takeaway from the whole ordeal is that you need to take a very active role in your own treatment. Unfortunately I was only able to become actively involved in managing my mother's treatment in the last few weeks. What I saw was a clear pattern of (what I'd regard as) negligence. There were so many missed opportunities to provide the care she needed. I came to the sad realisation that if you're not cracking the whip, many doctors will take the path of least resistance, and that in many cases, the only way to get documentation or help as a relative is to be ready to kick up a stink in-person.
The hardest part of cancer is you never really know anything. You’re not sure whether you have the disease, whether the treatments are working , whether you’re clear of the disease. You can’t even be sure that your diagnosis is accurate. There are few deterministic diagnostics . You can start an entire multi-year course of therapies costing a half million dollars, taking decades off of your life, and never know whether it was necessary or helpful in the first place.
Coming to peace with that uncertainty is the only way you can survive it.
And the guys advice to get a second opinion is a false confidence. The diagnostics are primitive and low signal, and they all share the same NCCN guidelines for therapies. Peace of mind has value, but you’re not going to receive any revelations.
My only submission will be to consider India, which is fast becoming a hub for medical tourism. You can get any test you want and meet specialists in hours, not even days.
As a fellow cancer-haver, I would give a piece of proactive advice for those (in the US) who do NOT have cancer or even suspect they have it:
Find a decent primary care doc who is not impossible to schedule with. Someday, if you do have a problem, the primary care doc will be able to send you off for scans, etc. much more easily when you are an existing patient. Getting appointments as an existing patient is much easier.
> AIs may downplay the seriousness of things. I was chatting with various models and most pushed me in the direction of “you don’t have cancer” for a while. Just something to note.
This is certainly another data point for "never trust AI chatbots".
Statistically, it makes sense- most people asking AI if they have cancer don't have cancer, so a model that is lacking detailed information should basically be returning based on the basal rate of cancer in the population with a threshold applied.
I think it's a truism that naive computer science people who have watched the rise of computers, the internet, and AI will always believe that curing diseases is a straightforward process and that new tech will rapidly fix all the old problems.
The folks who actually go work in the field, understand the structural problems, the costs/benefits, and the long slog to bring successful treatments to patients are skeptical. But we're still more than happy to be proved wrong- if Anthropic (more than OpenAI) is working on life sciences and drops some amazing information that transforms cancer care with massive positive results, we all win.
Do we all? Or does anyone with enough money to pay for Anthropic's IP, win? Nothing states that Anthropic/OpenAI/... have to share information they have generated. As the crunch for income becomes real, I doubt valuable things will remain free.
I don't see any scenario where showing that we can tremendously improve medical care, even if it's IP/trade secret from an AI company, isn't a win, when integrated over all the variables.
If they succeeded, you can bet everybody else will be duplicating their results within 2-3 years.
Gemini says what I think makes sense (there are multiple responses which could make sense)
[ if I gave you a picture of something on my skin could you diagnose it as a melanoma ]
No, I cannot diagnose skin conditions or identify melanoma from a photograph.
AI-based image analysis cannot replace a professional medical evaluation. Skin conditions—especially potentially serious ones like melanoma—require a physical examination, and often a dermatoscope or biopsy, by a qualified healthcare professional such as a dermatologist.
AIs often keep blabbering "ask a doctor" after every medical question and I absolutely despise this behavior.
99% of the time I'm asking the AI medical advice questions because (1) there is no specialist available on short notice (2) most specialists I actually see do not give me the sense they take things seriously enough (3) a lot of specialists are just incompetent.
> Or should it say it can't be sure and to ask a doctor?
It's an extremely slippery slope to having it say that about even the most basic medical information.
If you don't believe me, try any google search related to something as simple as hangover tips. The AI summary will tell you to call SAMHSA and then brutally stonewall you on anything else even tangential to alcohol.
I can't reproduce your claim. I get a medically correct response from the AI summary and then a link to the Mayo clinic at the top of the search results.
Disagree. You don't take the evaluation at face value. You still push back and explore every thread. You don't abandon your own logical reasoning.
But you definitely want to scour the entire search space for solutions.
And the most efficient means for that is LLMs.
It's my experience that doctors are compartmentalized in their thinking, limited in their time, and definitely will not be extensively exploring your case.
E.g., I had 30 years of resistant hypertension. Multiple medications. Saw many cardiologists. Nephrologists. I was told to "just lose weight." BP was erratic over the years. ER visits. It was awful.
I googled. Pheochromocytoma. Hyperaldosteronism. Asked the cardiologist, "Could it be this?"
"NAAAAH, just lose weight."
But I insisted on a referral to an endocrinologist. And when I suggested it to them, given my extensive history, they were basically like, "Oh yes, we'll get you tested. I'm surprised you haven't been tested before?"
I had a left adrenalectomy 6 months later. BP has been controlled ever since.
Yeah I did not mean that as a indication to not trust AI. But rather to use it as a companion and pressure test things doctors say with AI and things AI say with doctors.
This is the opposite of the experience people have when googling symptoms, though, where you often find articles suggesting that you’ve got some very serious condition when you do not. Interesting that the human bias when reading WebMD type articles is the opposite of the bias of LLMs.
That's not universal. I work in genetics, and we did an investigation a few months back, by asking various AIs whether a particular mutation causes $DISEASE. Invariably they were very strongly biased towards saying yes, even for completely obviously benign variants. I think that's because the majority of the literature out there describing variants is describing pathogenic ones, because why would you write an article about a benign variant, so the only material it has ingested is articles describing variants as pathogenic. In reality, the average person has millions of variants, and almost all of them are completely benign, so there should be a very strong pre-supposition that a given variant is benign unless there is fairly strong evidence saying otherwise.
True! However, don't both biases point to "don't (primarily) decide by googling or asking an LLM"? You'll either be extremely scared or extremely reassured.
Yes to this. I had a thyroid nodule which I saw many doctors and had multiple tests on. At each step of the process I conferred with AI, and each time it assured me not to be concerned, it's not cancer, etc. The doctors were less certain. It turned out to be cancer. I'm OK today! But something to keep in mind.
This goes for any medical expense, but also beware of the "Coordination of Benefits (COB) Questionnaire" required by your insurance company. They want to confirm your other coverage (e.g. Medicare) once a year, and sometimes the only way you know they are expecting it is when you get a call from your doctor's office that your claims are being silently denied. The insurance company won't send you an email, a call, or a ding in the portal, the language is buried at the bottom of a page of one of those PDFs you have to explicitly download.
I've had luck with just calling once a week or sending nastygrams asking why my claims are still denied, they usually say "oh that didn't go through I'll manually process that" and approve a few more each time. Incompetence vs maliciousness etc.
Looking at financial reports of the major health insurance stocks in the US makes me wonder if they are really "incompetence".
Take United HealthCare (UNH) for example, they reported $112.7 billion and net income of $4.11 billion in Q3/2026. That's great amount of revenue and profits to have enough resources to not stay "incompetence". It's not a coincidence.
Solid advice. On the point about surgery, seems obvious but surgeons are inclined to operate. They aren't inclined to tell you the surgery is unnecessary. They always say it's routine and they've done it many times before. All true but surgery can be very tough on your body as I saw with my late father. Complications happen more than anyone will admit.
In 2021/2022, I did Google Drive, so I could see it on my phone and other machines.
If this happened now (knock wood) it would be a private GH repo with every test, every image, every receipt, every appointment, every note. Then skills to ingest/OCR/normalize them all into a common format of MD. Point a Claude Code project at it, and fuzzy search it with open questions like "why did Dr. Smith say this" etc.
There are a number of startups (and some that already got aqui-hired) working on the problem of "how do i connect with a medical provider who specializes (or at least has seen before) what i have/think i have?" what I've taken away from this is the medical industry is a lot more fragmented than engineers would prefer. It's been a while since I checked but there seem to be at least 30+ startups at least past the series A stage of "fixing" this problem.
Our friend group went through the support-mode version of this this year and much of the advice rings true.
To add, a giant shared document that the group of friends had access to in order to take notes. Findings, theories, doctor statements will be shared when the patient isn't in a great place to be taking notes.
And for anyone reading this that might have someone facing cancer in their lives, go make a nuisance of yourself being present - feel empowered to spend a bit more time than you might initially think is necessary/helpful with them. Facing this stuff alone is when it is at its hardest.
I was hospitalised (not cancer) and completely zoinked out of my mind due to sleep deprivation, constant blood loss and being in pain 24/7. People did visit, but I guess they just thought... I have things under control? I wish they had talked to the doctors and asked more questions. In the end I came out of it fine, but I probably would have gotten a better result with someone advocating for me.
Please go and be a nuisance. As someone with a clear head you will likely be able to understand the topic better, from a more neutral standpoint, and potentially push for the best possible treatment.
> new folder on my Mac, and after appointments I’d dictate what happened and what the doctor said
I cannot recommend this enough, including writing down almost every day about symptoms and progress. I didn't have cancer, something else, but it was very valuable to be able to go back and see exactly how long time a symptom has been present and when it disappeared.
Doctors also seem to react well to being able to be precise in descriptions of what happened when.
> Doctors also seem to react well to being able to be precise in descriptions of what happened when.
They do. In my experience they're usually pleasantly surprised when you have dates and timelines rather than "oh I don't know, about a year ago?"
That being said the reaction differs if you offer a self diagnosis (assisted by google or chatgpt) rather than just symptoms. There will not be pleasantness. It's a toss up between a dismissive "yeah maybe" and "uh uh, did google tell you this?" Many doctors will 100% listen and consider what you say, but in my long life I've learned that offering a self diagnosis must be done very tactfully.
On one hand it's understandable, us as programmers don't enjoy having a nocoder arrive with "yeah so chatgpt says this is no good" and having to explain to them why they're wrong. On the other hand modern patients do their own research before consulting, so it's worth at least considering what's being said.
You can do whatevvr you want with the audio files - have them transcribe them, summarize them, hand them to an agent, upload them to your cloud, whatever.
The standby and talk time is really great on both the pins and the credit card sized versions.
I have a lot of friends that now use them with elderly parents/their own medical care when they need to really be able to have something automatically record/transcribe the visits.
Is there a completely local option for something like this? I love the idea, but I don't love having yet another middleman in between everything I say and the model provider of my choice.
Local-first Plaud Note Pro recording vault, transcription, and Markdown workspace. Which sounds like what you want.
2. the Plaud SDK will let you pull from the device and send it wherever you want without touching their servers.
3. You can also use the mobile app, disable cloud sync, and export each audio file as mp3/wav to your phone/tablet/whatever if you don't want to use #1 or #2.
You can have it upload to your private cloud without doing any of these, but it still transits their servers first i believe, which it sounds like you are trying to avoid
Thank you for this. The timing could not be more perfect; my husband was just diagnosed with prostate cancer last week and we have the first meeting with his urologist in less than an hour.
> AIs may downplay the seriousness of things. I was chatting with various models and most pushed me in the direction of “you don’t have cancer” for a while. Just something to note.
Hey, could you share one of these chats with the "Share chat" function? This might be of interest to a lot of law students.
Just by being posted here on hn, it will probably be discoverable by anyone that searches for cases where an LLM gave damaging medical advice.
Have had terrible pain and muscle clenching in my body since I was a teen (am 52 now) and for the past 15+ years, have been intensely working with the medical system to figure out the cause (have gotten a lot of great relief!). Agree with everything said in this blog in working with the medical system. To put my spin on it:
- You are the least-constrained team member in your healthcare: At an appointment, your doctors only get to spend ~30 min on your problem and it's unrealistic to expect them to be as deeply involved as you are on your healthcare. Yeah, you yourself can spend days or even weeks researching you health problems and planning your healthcare.
- Research your health problems: you don't need to be an expert to read about your health problem, learn the basic anatomy involved and the high and mid-level details of the surgery or treatment. You'll have to look up a lot of terms, but it's not that bad and the articles aren't that difficult to understand at a high-level.
- You are also the manager of your healthcare: Planning and seeing the big picture is critical. You can optimize a lot of the planning of appointments, exams and surgeries buy thoughtful planning. And, you can definitely catch a lot of opportunties and mistakes in decisions that are made. Just like in a tech project, a couple of good random ideas can lead you to some fantastic outcomes.
There are many more, but yeah, working with the healthcare system is an skill that can be studied and learned. Really useful.
"You can find the “Standard of Care” flow charts for every cancer type. "
This is good advice for any non simple medical problem. Because while you may not have the book knowledge and definitely not the clinical experience you probably can tell when your care is deviating from standard care.
have you tried PNC-27 peptide? Another option is focused ultrasound (HIFU) that I would look into before going the traditional route, which might kill you quicker than the cancer itself.
Sure, there are bad apples in medicine just like there are in tech. But knowing many doctors personally, reading this fills me with equal parts frustration at your cynicism and sadness for what they endure.
What's the difference for a physician today vs. 30 years ago? Among other things, today's physicians struggle because they're being crushed: continuously squeezed by the financialization of their hospital/practice, carrying larger debt, more time spent fighting the insurance machine just to get basic treatments approved. On top of all of that, they are less respected in general and often face outright hostility from patients... all while being paid relatively less than their predecessors.
The second opinion advice is great, and what I tell everyone I know who gets cancer.
My mom was diagnosed with stage 1 cancer in 2006 in Idaho. I was a PhD student at MIT at the time and a friend in lab helped me get an appointment at Dana-Farber. I thought it was probably overkill (it was a common cancer) but we did it anyway. They said everything in Idaho was standard of care but suggested one extra test, which Idaho team then reluctantly did, which revealed distant metastasis (stage 4! ), dramatically changing her treatment trajectory. She lived another 15 years (I miss you Mom).
Asking for a second opinion sucks. A lot of us are preconditioned from birth to trust our clinicians. But you're going on a journey and your life (or the life of your loved one) is on the line. Insurance often covers it. Your doctor will NOT be offended.
Think of it this way : if you were deploying code to the mars rover, and your colleague asked to do a code review before you pushed go, would you be offended? This is even more important than that.
Other story, for balance: My father was diagnosed (again, in Idaho) with a rare ocuclar melanoma. Very few cases, but highly treatable. The specialist was in SF where I lived at the time. We went there, and it was a very different experience from Dana-Farber. The clinician was an academic who only saw patients like once a week. People were sitting on the floor lined up out the door.
His staff was gruff, there was such limited information as we progressed through the system, there were so many patients there from all over the western part of the US. For many of them it was their first time with cancer, and sitting there in the waiting room with my (non-medical!!!) bio training my Dad would often offer my services to "explain" something. Which I did, and I think I helped, but it was all rough.
The main doctor was so gruff and obnoxious that I emailed my MD friends in Boston (was still in grad school) asking how I could file a complaint.
But at the end of the day that process helped my father (and many of those other people ) get state-of-the-art proton beam therapy, covered by insurance.
Sadly my dad's cancer came back a short time later and he passed away (miss you too Dad).
But now, 15 years later, having been through the healthcare system in so many ways, and having many friends who are academic specialist MDs, I recognize that the doctor in SF was operating with incredible constraints, finite resources, and probably tired. And my Dad got the best possible treatment technology as a result of the second opinion.
But at the time I wanted to strangle the doctor.
I'm writing this just to say that sometimes the second opinion is tough. Sometimes it's in a far-away place or the doctors are jerks. Maybe even borderline unprofessional. They're the bastard operator from hell in their own little world. But again, this is life-and-death.
GET THAT SECOND OPINION EVEN IF THE DOCTOR IS A DICK.
Yeah absolutely on the 2nd opinion, my dad went into his GP and said “I think I have lung cancer”, after a period of difficulty breathing and low energy. The GP diagnosed him with low iron and gave him some iron supplements, didn’t even get a scan. A few months later he had to have a couple of litres of fluid drained from his lungs while on holiday, turned out to be mesothelioma. Obviously we’d prefer it to be low iron, but better to know what is going on and be able to respond to it.
Is it ok/recommended to tell the doctor that you're getting 2nd opinion from that you're coming to them for a 2nd opinion?
To the doctor you're getting the second opinion from, don't tell them the first opinion right off the bat until you've heard the second opinion. This to not put them in a position where they feel any pressure whatsoever to agree or disagree to the first. You want their own uninfluenced opinion. Afterwards, yes, you can tell them the first opinion, so they can give their separate opinion on that.
Yes because everyone will want to share records / data. The specialized clinics / centers are used to this role! Especially if you are going from a more-generic to a more-specialized center, but even if you're walking down the street.
This is literally life-and-death. My recommendation is for full transparency, it was crucial for us.
Default to telling everything to your physicians. A good physician will have zero qualms with you getting a second opinion.
I've heard it put this way: Never lie to you doctor, your lawyer, or your accountant.
The only people who trust clinicians are people who haven't been through the healthcare system. There's the before time and after time. It changes you. Every field has good people, bad people and mediocre people. Doctors are no different.
Anyway, I would say I actually had relatively positive experience with Thyroid cancer. I had been seeing my Endo for 10 years at that point since I had hypothyroidism. His nurse was on top of everything. Very calm and reassuring during the whole process.
But all my experiences with the healthcare system outside of that were just disappointing. I had RCVS 2 years ago and I was in the ER and the radiologist summarized the report wrong even though he has read it correctly. They were starting me on stroke protocol and giving me these drugs but I had ChatGPT read it and it was like this is wrong. It's supposed to say no significant stenosis in the neck. It actually said significant stenosis in the neck. The dr reported it immediately and the radiologist corrected it. What a shit show. No one could even give me a straight answer on if I could go back to exercising or when I can get off a medication. Every doctor I saw was completely different. Have a few other stories like that pre LLM's. But you have to advocate for yourself. And always double check the doctors with LLM's now a days.
Even the great doctors make mistakes. As a patient, you know your history front to back, but doctors can forget or miss even basic details. They tend to have little time for each patient, so I understand how it happens. You have to continually pay attention, correct people and make sure to accurately describe everything you know. Be a pain in the butt, do a ton of your own research, and ask ask ask ask ask.
I was with you right up until your last sentence. Absolutely get a second opinion for any diagnosis that you deem warranted, but putting your healthcare decisions in the hands of an LLM is not the route I'd be suggesting to anyone.
I read it more charitably. Double check with the LLM because it is pretty good a lot of the time and might uncover some useful insights or oversights. Don't blindly trust what it says, definitely, but use what you get from it to guide further inquiry from reputable sources.
My suggestion is that if you're within a 2-3 hour drive of major cancer centers - just use the US News list https://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/rankings/cancer - go there instead of your local community hospital. The top cancer hospitals in the world accept your health insurance (probably), so why not go there? Use your vacations days, book hotels if you have to - this is the time to go all out.
My experience: I was horribly sick for 10 months, none of my local doctors could figure it out, then I drove to Penn Medicine in Philadelphia and they did the right labwork in the first visit. These top centers just have different mindset than your community hospitals.
Really good advice! There are so many benefits of the big centers, the largest one being speed. At MD Anderson I got a question answered within 20 minutes of my visit to a Dr that happened by him calling the pathologist. If that wasn't at a cancer center, it would have take days, or more likely, the question never would have been answered at all.
Record keeping is a good idea for any medical thing.
Quite a lot of serious medical things start out seeming not serious, including a lot of cancers. Basically once an ailment seems unusual, like “hmm this is not going away like usual,” start writing down every time, date, and detail you can remember back to when it started. Then keep that current.
Doing this will help the accuracy of your treatment.
There are also a bunch of implicit “timers” in standards of care, like take OTC drugs and rest for a week, then come back if it is still not resolved. Having a detailed precise timeline documented can help skip through those. The doctor may be able to look at the detail and say “ok you’ve already tried the easy fixes, let’s dig deeper.”
Had a family member recently go through unexpected major surgery.
One thing I would mention:
You are not dealing with a monolithic entity with regards to a hospital.
There are really multiple groups with oftentimes competing interests e.g.
- case manager wants you out and home b/c that is the best "score" for the hospital. They also DO NOT want you to qualify for Medicare if you are a senior b/c, again, "score" gets dinged if Medicare gets involved
- surgeons want you out as they don't want you to pick up hospital infection. They want you to go to a rehab facility as that will more likely lead to a good outcome
- the hospitalist wants you to be stable in the short term so will pump you with whatever medications are necessary to get you "back to normal" without addressing any root cause
- the nurses generally care about you as a person as they deal with you the most but oftentimes have the least amount of say over your case
- in one of those perverse incentives/unintended consequences: if you do TOO well on a physical ability test, that might disqualify you from certain coverage even if you are below the threshold on other ability tests. That can have gigantic insurance implications.
This is prompting me to write my own version of the OP blog post.
The first point is by far the most important. The US healthcare system (and probably others) is an unfeeling machine and you have to treat it that way. Ask for earlier appointments, cancellations, and referrals to other specialists. Navigate it as if nobody knows (or cares) what you're up to. Doctors tend to only exist within their silo and it's often on you to request a different type of doctor or even another one of the same type. Be a pain in the ass, your survival may depend on it.
Personal story: I was having trouble using my left arm. Like, couldn't lift or type or do much of anything with it. Was told it was a pinched nerve by physiatrists and orthopedists, despite having no pain. Only when I specifically requested for a referral to a second neurologist did he order the head MRI which exposed a brain tumor in my motor cortex. We were able to move quickly and get me on a treatment plan which has bought me a lot of time. Had I not advocated for myself, it would have probably mutated into a much worse type and killed me soon.
I became close friends with a doctor over the past couple years and she's an extremely caring and diligent person. Truly wonderful went into it for the right reasons.
By all accounts is amazing to her patients, but god the amount of work thrown at a PCP and the deluge of emails and just how little life the system gives you (at least while in residency, I guess I'll see what happens after)... like I have to imagine our care could be so much better if we weren't trying to optimize the system and had more resources.
My mom is a teacher and it's similar there, she loves kids so much and after a few decades she absolutely cannot wait to be done. She was excellent at the start of her career and got kudos from absolutely everyone but now she's just getting by until retirement because she can't take it anymore.
I had to quite literally sit in a doctor's office and make a public nuisance of myself to get a referral for a family member to a specialist for cancer when the regular doctor said it was just back pain. Then I drove the 2 hours to their office to get the appointment. It was lymphoma.
People can't ignore you as effectively if you're in their physical space. When it comes to your health or the health of your family, do not back down. Doctors are used to nuts who googled the symptoms or joined a Facebook group and have all the answers already. Make it clear you have NO answers but NEED them asap.
I've had similar experiences. It's kind of terrifying, actually, you have to walk the line of being annoying enough to get what you want but not so annoying they completely ignore you.
One of the things I've learned is to apply the Socratic method, preferably in front of their colleagues if they try to brush you off. Also, if you've got scary symptoms, demand they write down what your symptoms are on your record and why they aren't concerned, then demand a copy of all relevant records (it's your property) -- this often gets them to reevaluate your risk in terms of their career.
Worst case scenario, you can make up medical history. I had a family member pass recently from colorectal cancer. They had symptoms but their PCP kept insisting they were too young. My family member suddenly "remembered" her aunt died of CRC when she was a kid. This got her referred to a gastroenterologist, and they found out she was stage 4...after her PCP delayed her diagnosis for like a year. She actually had grounds for a malpractice suit but who's got the energy or money for that when they're fighting stage 4 cancer?
Also, know your state's agency responsible for policing health insurance. This family member's insurance company routinely tried to deny life saving procedures, but a call to the right govt agency set them in line each time.
This is something I don't understand of the US and other "developed" countries health systems.
Here in Mexico, i can get to doctoralia and make an appointment with a high specialist , like a Vascular Neurosurgeon. All by myself. The first visit will to maybe $200 usd (and that's very high) and normally it's a week away at most. No waiting on the private health option.
Of course if you go with public health, it's a disaster and a shame.
What other countries describe is the equivalent of your public health system. If you're willing to pay out of pocket, like you describe, you can have a similar experience in the US. However, that can get expensive quickly since you normally don't have just one appointment with a vascular neurosurgeon.
But the thing is that paying out of pocket would be very expensive in the "developed" countries.
The advantage of the less developed countries is that you can get pretty good private medical care for a reasonably price. The quality may not match the very best care available in the rich countries, but in many cases, it is adequate.
I have a similar but more benign story, and cannot emphasize enough how correct this comment is. I had severe abdominal pain and vomiting. My PCP told me it was GERD and I should lose weight. Two days later I was getting an emergency cholecystectomy because my gall bladder had necrotized.
A good shorthand is that unless a doctor has positively identified something through imaging or biopsy do not trust them when they tell you what something is or what to do about it.
If you aren't sure how best to advocate for yourself, use AI to help figure out what tests and referrals to ask for. You might feel like a jerk, but don't expect anyone to care about you more than you do.
Been gone through something similar. It's important to be persistent. My PET-CT was originally scheduled for 6 weeks, and they couldn't get it sooner. I had to call every imaging labs within 50-100 miles radius, eventually got one within the next couple of days.
The next important one is to find the best doctor you could afford. I didn't have a lot of faith on my local oncologist, especially when he said that my cancer (nasopharyngeal carcinoma) is rare and had not much experience with it. I was able to get ahold of the chief surgeon at UCSF, purely by luck. Felt a lot better when he said that this type of cancer is pretty common for south-asian descent. He has dealt with it quite often due to a large concentration of asian in the bay area.
The treatment sucks, but small price to pay considering I can spend more time with my family.
> I was able to get ahold of the chief surgeon at UCSF
And people like this are typically not that difficult to get in contact with via email.
Hell, I’ve successfully used LinkedIn to get an appointment when calling the main office didn’t work.
Get creative and trust no one.
> Only when I specifically requested for a referral to a second neurologist did he order the head MRI which exposed a brain tumor in my motor cortex.
Oh my. I did not expect this.
I'm glad you caught it early, and I hope you have the best outcome you can, and thank you for sharing your story.
If you've dealt with the American medical system then stories like this aren't very surprising. I'm not going to act like this is everyone's story (a lot of people have pretty smooth experiences) but it happens a lot more often than it should.
It's not unique to America. Specialists are in high demand everywhere and seeing them means you have to pass through a screen of generalists who first rule out all the common explanations for your symptoms.
But GP's point is otherwise true. It's just a job to them. They see dozens of sick people every day. There's no way to be empathetically engaged with all of them or really any of them and still be effective. It's not personal, and they aren't ignoring you. You're a bug report in their ticket system. Understand that and you'll be able to deal with the system more effectively.
If you have halfway decent insurance in the US you do not need a referral to see a specialist.
The exception to this rule is if you are in an HMO like Kaiser which force you through "level one support" (your GP) or if the specialist is so busy they require a referral to screen out the social media schizos.
However, many (most?) specialists won't see you without a referral unless they are self pay.
Whether you need a referral typically depends on your insurance plan, not the doctor you want to see.
Yes. They don't have time to deal with hypochondriacs who just show up. Unless you are an existing patient asking for followup, or have a referral, many will not schedule you or will maybe give you an appointent six months from now.
The number one thing I tell anyone who is going through any sort of medical situation that requires extensive care, you have to be the biggest advocate for your care. If youre not comfortable doing that, then find a loved one who will stand by your side and be that person. Healthcare is a business and you need to treat it with the same vigor you tackle business problems because your issue is a business problem to them.
Don’t forget, Doctors are just well read mechanics
I had a heart condition (myocarditis) recently after a viral episode, despite the obvious prognosis the ER doctor treated me for a heart attack instead without consulting a cardiologist which sent me to the ICU.
I should have mistrusted the doctor and trusted the AIs more, unless they gave me compelling reasoning. Don’t give up your decisions to anyone, incompetence is abound.
It's worse everywhere else. There are no specialists in all of the government-run systems I've dealt with and at some point, you really have no options left.
Canada introduced MAID for this reason.
> It's worse everywhere else.
You’ve dealt with every health system on earth as a patient?
> There are no specialists in all of the government-run systems
This is completely inaccurate. Every government run system has specialists.
Everything you have said is incorrect.
It's an over generalization but think this person has a point. The US health system has it problems (cost!!), but have read that since it's money driven instead of a government service, compared to other healthcare systems, it's often got a shorter wait time to see a doctor. This makes sense, a lot of students want to become doctors in the US, because they can make a lot of money
I feel like the >(cost!!) factor can't really be overstated there. IF you have money then you can get healthcare, if you don't, then you're out of luck. It's a massive gate which needs to be passed, and if you can't pass, then you're locked out with no alternative.
That doesn't sound great to me (read: broken), because it means its not evenly accessible across your society. I wouldn't count that as a good system to be honest.
I have limited experience with the New Zealand and Japanese medical systems, and from a similarly arms-length engagement with them, I think I would prefer them over everything I've read about the US system. You still have the same issues with having to advocate for yourself, but you can at least get access to good healthcare across the board - and if you go private (which as a late 30s / early 40s guy, cost around NZ$60 / month), you can get access to care at private facilities much faster than via public.
It is most definitely imperfect, but it _is_ designed to be accessible to everyone.
I explored specializing in health econ in college. My professor put it this way - health care is a scarce good. There's only so many doctors, so much medicine, so many beds. You have to control access to the goods somehow, otherwise you have Tragedy of the Commons.
In the rest of the world, it's controlled by extended wait times. In the US, it's cost. You can have moral arguments about what's fair, but that's the economic reality.
At the time I as studying this (early 2010's), the average wait time of diagnosis to first treatment for breast cancer in the US was 12 days. In NIH, it was 5 months.
> but have read
You read that where? What evidence do you have? In my experience, Americans are often blissfully unaware about how poor their health services are.
As someone who has seen many health services up close (from founding a health tech company and literally visiting myriad health establishments around the world, over the past few decades), the US hospitals and clinics always struck me as the most run down. But as soon as I walked in the boardroom at UHG or HCA, it suddenly all became a lot more glamorous.
And whilst the US does ok with cancer outcomes, so do other nations like Germany, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Most advanced nations have universal healthcare with similar outcomes to the US, but for significantly less money. They also don’t leave citizens destitute for having the unmitigated gall to impose an unexpected health emergency on themselves.
The US system funnels profit, it doesn’t provide better healthcare.
> Canada introduced MAID for this reason.
No they didn't.
There are tons of specialists in Canada. You're talking out of your ass.
just lost my mom in law with a multi year battle with cancer. she was very proactive with her health as this article describes.
it's also important to remember that modern medicine, as wonderful as it is, is still limited. your particular type may have x lines of treatment, the cancer eventually mutates, your body can't handle the latter / harsher treatments, and...that's it.
Definitely get the second opinion, examine all the options, find the open minded doctor, potentially try an experimental treatment. That's all good. But there's a certain piece you or anyone can't control, and it's worth sitting with that too. That no matter what you might do, you might still end up at the end much sooner than you want to. My MIL's 5 year prognosis was awful, and she passed between 3 & 4 years.
But there's a CHANCE you might not and you might beat it, or at least live longer than expected. And even if you don't, you will pass knowing you did everything you reasonably could given the state of medicine today. Both of those are worth fighting for.
And make sure you have somebody around that will pay attention to changes in symptoms. My MIL almost died earlier this year because everyone thought her declining symptoms were the cancer. Turns out it was just too much calcium, once they treated she got a few extra months. She likely would've lived longer had they all caught it earlier.
Is there adverse selection in reports of the callousness, incompetence and greed of US healthcare providers?
Three years ago, of necessity I became a big-time consumer of healthcare[1] and I can't believe I just been lucky that nearly all my doctors seemed reasonable and effectively treated me. Of the dozen or so doctors I dealt with only one left me with a bad feeling.
[1] Stage 4 renal cancer, successfully treated with immunotherapy and surgery at Perlmutter Cancer Center in NYC.
This is fantastic. Thanks for posting it, JJ. There's a very strong chance you'll save n>0 lives by posting this.
Minor addition: When you talk to someone who has undergone the surgery, try to find someone that's a similar age and in similar shape to you, otherwise you may get wildly varying answers.
You'll respond, experience and heal from a surgery quite differently at 40 vs 50.
The late Jake Seliger and his widow Bess blogged at length about their experience navigating the medical system after his squamous cell cancer diagnosis. That was in 2023-25 though.
jakeseliger.com
bessstillman.substack.com
This is his last article I think. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41157974
Good advice. As someone for whom this is currently relevant, let me add "find a support group".
At least, if it's a common cancer, a group will gather accumulated wisdom and can research better than a single person.
Also, they can help more with practical questions, like financial aid, how to manage sleep and pain, etc.
This is a good addition, although I have not joined one which is probably why I didn't include it in the list. I should find a group to join.
This is so grim. Why is this a list of things you need to worry about?
I had testicular cancer a decade ago (in Ireland). I found a lump, went to my GP, had a scan 2 days later, and surgery 12 later. Followed by chemo and a RPNLD as was needed.
I didn’t need to chase any doctors, I trusted every doctor I met (had I had AI then I wouldn’t have wasted time with them).
I got a second opinion, because why not, but they agreed with my onc.
Is this some very US coded list that isn’t relevant to my experiences in Ireland?
ps. I’m not sure why genetic testing is suggested here?
> If surgery is recommended, I would try and talk to someone who has undergone the surgery. I did not do this and regret it.
This applies to all surgery.
The medical system uses coarse statistics, like "did the condition go away" and "did the patient survive".
"The patient went through a devastatingly painful 9 months and slowly recovered over the course of years to work towards a small improvement in the original symptom" may be classified as a success.
And don't forget that many actors in the system are financially incentivized to recommend interventions.
This article is very relevant to me. Just this last Sunday I watched my mother die of melanoma.
My big takeaway from the whole ordeal is that you need to take a very active role in your own treatment. Unfortunately I was only able to become actively involved in managing my mother's treatment in the last few weeks. What I saw was a clear pattern of (what I'd regard as) negligence. There were so many missed opportunities to provide the care she needed. I came to the sad realisation that if you're not cracking the whip, many doctors will take the path of least resistance, and that in many cases, the only way to get documentation or help as a relative is to be ready to kick up a stink in-person.
I'd be happy to go into more detail.
The hardest part of cancer is you never really know anything. You’re not sure whether you have the disease, whether the treatments are working , whether you’re clear of the disease. You can’t even be sure that your diagnosis is accurate. There are few deterministic diagnostics . You can start an entire multi-year course of therapies costing a half million dollars, taking decades off of your life, and never know whether it was necessary or helpful in the first place.
Coming to peace with that uncertainty is the only way you can survive it.
And the guys advice to get a second opinion is a false confidence. The diagnostics are primitive and low signal, and they all share the same NCCN guidelines for therapies. Peace of mind has value, but you’re not going to receive any revelations.
Extremely sorry you had to go through this.
My only submission will be to consider India, which is fast becoming a hub for medical tourism. You can get any test you want and meet specialists in hours, not even days.
Also China...China is generally better for advanced medical technology and complex hospital-based treatments.
As a fellow cancer-haver, I would give a piece of proactive advice for those (in the US) who do NOT have cancer or even suspect they have it:
Find a decent primary care doc who is not impossible to schedule with. Someday, if you do have a problem, the primary care doc will be able to send you off for scans, etc. much more easily when you are an existing patient. Getting appointments as an existing patient is much easier.
> AIs may downplay the seriousness of things. I was chatting with various models and most pushed me in the direction of “you don’t have cancer” for a while. Just something to note.
This is certainly another data point for "never trust AI chatbots".
Statistically, it makes sense- most people asking AI if they have cancer don't have cancer, so a model that is lacking detailed information should basically be returning based on the basal rate of cancer in the population with a threshold applied.
But OpenAI said we have AGI now...
I think it's a truism that naive computer science people who have watched the rise of computers, the internet, and AI will always believe that curing diseases is a straightforward process and that new tech will rapidly fix all the old problems.
The folks who actually go work in the field, understand the structural problems, the costs/benefits, and the long slog to bring successful treatments to patients are skeptical. But we're still more than happy to be proved wrong- if Anthropic (more than OpenAI) is working on life sciences and drops some amazing information that transforms cancer care with massive positive results, we all win.
> we all win
Do we all? Or does anyone with enough money to pay for Anthropic's IP, win? Nothing states that Anthropic/OpenAI/... have to share information they have generated. As the crunch for income becomes real, I doubt valuable things will remain free.
I don't see any scenario where showing that we can tremendously improve medical care, even if it's IP/trade secret from an AI company, isn't a win, when integrated over all the variables.
If they succeeded, you can bet everybody else will be duplicating their results within 2-3 years.
AGI isn't magic. Not even an excellent oncologist can reliably diagnose you without actually looking at you first.
Should it? Or should it say it can't be sure and to ask a doctor?
Doctors might do the same thing, of course, but at least then there's a real (accountable) person responsible for deciding that "threshold."
Gemini says what I think makes sense (there are multiple responses which could make sense)
[ if I gave you a picture of something on my skin could you diagnose it as a melanoma ]
No, I cannot diagnose skin conditions or identify melanoma from a photograph.
AI-based image analysis cannot replace a professional medical evaluation. Skin conditions—especially potentially serious ones like melanoma—require a physical examination, and often a dermatoscope or biopsy, by a qualified healthcare professional such as a dermatologist.
AIs often keep blabbering "ask a doctor" after every medical question and I absolutely despise this behavior.
99% of the time I'm asking the AI medical advice questions because (1) there is no specialist available on short notice (2) most specialists I actually see do not give me the sense they take things seriously enough (3) a lot of specialists are just incompetent.
> Or should it say it can't be sure and to ask a doctor?
It's an extremely slippery slope to having it say that about even the most basic medical information.
If you don't believe me, try any google search related to something as simple as hangover tips. The AI summary will tell you to call SAMHSA and then brutally stonewall you on anything else even tangential to alcohol.
I can't reproduce your claim. I get a medically correct response from the AI summary and then a link to the Mayo clinic at the top of the search results.
Disagree. You don't take the evaluation at face value. You still push back and explore every thread. You don't abandon your own logical reasoning.
But you definitely want to scour the entire search space for solutions.
And the most efficient means for that is LLMs.
It's my experience that doctors are compartmentalized in their thinking, limited in their time, and definitely will not be extensively exploring your case.
E.g., I had 30 years of resistant hypertension. Multiple medications. Saw many cardiologists. Nephrologists. I was told to "just lose weight." BP was erratic over the years. ER visits. It was awful.
I googled. Pheochromocytoma. Hyperaldosteronism. Asked the cardiologist, "Could it be this?"
"NAAAAH, just lose weight."
But I insisted on a referral to an endocrinologist. And when I suggested it to them, given my extensive history, they were basically like, "Oh yes, we'll get you tested. I'm surprised you haven't been tested before?"
I had a left adrenalectomy 6 months later. BP has been controlled ever since.
They don't know everything. They can't.
Yeah I did not mean that as a indication to not trust AI. But rather to use it as a companion and pressure test things doctors say with AI and things AI say with doctors.
This is the opposite of the experience people have when googling symptoms, though, where you often find articles suggesting that you’ve got some very serious condition when you do not. Interesting that the human bias when reading WebMD type articles is the opposite of the bias of LLMs.
That's not universal. I work in genetics, and we did an investigation a few months back, by asking various AIs whether a particular mutation causes $DISEASE. Invariably they were very strongly biased towards saying yes, even for completely obviously benign variants. I think that's because the majority of the literature out there describing variants is describing pathogenic ones, because why would you write an article about a benign variant, so the only material it has ingested is articles describing variants as pathogenic. In reality, the average person has millions of variants, and almost all of them are completely benign, so there should be a very strong pre-supposition that a given variant is benign unless there is fairly strong evidence saying otherwise.
True! However, don't both biases point to "don't (primarily) decide by googling or asking an LLM"? You'll either be extremely scared or extremely reassured.
Yeah, while what I wrote was true the takeaway should have been something like:
- You should pressure test anything an AI says with your doctors, and anything a doctor says with AI.
> AIs may downplay the seriousness of things.
Yes to this. I had a thyroid nodule which I saw many doctors and had multiple tests on. At each step of the process I conferred with AI, and each time it assured me not to be concerned, it's not cancer, etc. The doctors were less certain. It turned out to be cancer. I'm OK today! But something to keep in mind.
This goes for any medical expense, but also beware of the "Coordination of Benefits (COB) Questionnaire" required by your insurance company. They want to confirm your other coverage (e.g. Medicare) once a year, and sometimes the only way you know they are expecting it is when you get a call from your doctor's office that your claims are being silently denied. The insurance company won't send you an email, a call, or a ding in the portal, the language is buried at the bottom of a page of one of those PDFs you have to explicitly download.
I've had luck with just calling once a week or sending nastygrams asking why my claims are still denied, they usually say "oh that didn't go through I'll manually process that" and approve a few more each time. Incompetence vs maliciousness etc.
>Incompetence vs maliciousness etc.
Looking at financial reports of the major health insurance stocks in the US makes me wonder if they are really "incompetence".
Take United HealthCare (UNH) for example, they reported $112.7 billion and net income of $4.11 billion in Q3/2026. That's great amount of revenue and profits to have enough resources to not stay "incompetence". It's not a coincidence.
So if they increased the amount of accepted claims by 5% they’d be underwater? Seems like they’re right on the edge here.
Solid advice. On the point about surgery, seems obvious but surgeons are inclined to operate. They aren't inclined to tell you the surgery is unnecessary. They always say it's routine and they've done it many times before. All true but surgery can be very tough on your body as I saw with my late father. Complications happen more than anyone will admit.
> new folder on my Mac
In 2021/2022, I did Google Drive, so I could see it on my phone and other machines.
If this happened now (knock wood) it would be a private GH repo with every test, every image, every receipt, every appointment, every note. Then skills to ingest/OCR/normalize them all into a common format of MD. Point a Claude Code project at it, and fuzzy search it with open questions like "why did Dr. Smith say this" etc.
There are a number of startups (and some that already got aqui-hired) working on the problem of "how do i connect with a medical provider who specializes (or at least has seen before) what i have/think i have?" what I've taken away from this is the medical industry is a lot more fragmented than engineers would prefer. It's been a while since I checked but there seem to be at least 30+ startups at least past the series A stage of "fixing" this problem.
Meaningful.
Our friend group went through the support-mode version of this this year and much of the advice rings true.
To add, a giant shared document that the group of friends had access to in order to take notes. Findings, theories, doctor statements will be shared when the patient isn't in a great place to be taking notes.
And for anyone reading this that might have someone facing cancer in their lives, go make a nuisance of yourself being present - feel empowered to spend a bit more time than you might initially think is necessary/helpful with them. Facing this stuff alone is when it is at its hardest.
> go make a nuisance of yourself being present
I was hospitalised (not cancer) and completely zoinked out of my mind due to sleep deprivation, constant blood loss and being in pain 24/7. People did visit, but I guess they just thought... I have things under control? I wish they had talked to the doctors and asked more questions. In the end I came out of it fine, but I probably would have gotten a better result with someone advocating for me.
Please go and be a nuisance. As someone with a clear head you will likely be able to understand the topic better, from a more neutral standpoint, and potentially push for the best possible treatment.
> new folder on my Mac, and after appointments I’d dictate what happened and what the doctor said
I cannot recommend this enough, including writing down almost every day about symptoms and progress. I didn't have cancer, something else, but it was very valuable to be able to go back and see exactly how long time a symptom has been present and when it disappeared.
Doctors also seem to react well to being able to be precise in descriptions of what happened when.
That's because the baseline response doctors are used to goes something like this:
Doc: "Do you have any other medical conditions besides your {red eye,stomach ache,itchy foot}?"
Patient: "No."
Doc: "Are you taking any meds?"
Patient: "Yes I am currently on chemotherapy for my cancer."
Doc: "Okay... so you have cancer?"
Patient: "Yes I have lung cancer."
What are we all filling out those forms before the visit for if the doctor's not even going to read them before we see them?
> Doctors also seem to react well to being able to be precise in descriptions of what happened when.
They do. In my experience they're usually pleasantly surprised when you have dates and timelines rather than "oh I don't know, about a year ago?"
That being said the reaction differs if you offer a self diagnosis (assisted by google or chatgpt) rather than just symptoms. There will not be pleasantness. It's a toss up between a dismissive "yeah maybe" and "uh uh, did google tell you this?" Many doctors will 100% listen and consider what you say, but in my long life I've learned that offering a self diagnosis must be done very tactfully.
On one hand it's understandable, us as programmers don't enjoy having a nocoder arrive with "yeah so chatgpt says this is no good" and having to explain to them why they're wrong. On the other hand modern patients do their own research before consulting, so it's worth at least considering what's being said.
[delayed]
I have a private EMR system and we plug in everything into it through an agent. Every medication, every sniffle. It’s fun!
Get one of these: https://www.plaud.ai/
You can do whatevvr you want with the audio files - have them transcribe them, summarize them, hand them to an agent, upload them to your cloud, whatever.
The standby and talk time is really great on both the pins and the credit card sized versions.
I have a lot of friends that now use them with elderly parents/their own medical care when they need to really be able to have something automatically record/transcribe the visits.
Is there a completely local option for something like this? I love the idea, but I don't love having yet another middleman in between everything I say and the model provider of my choice.
Device wise - i never found one as good and i played with a bunch. However, you have three options with plaud that i'm aware of:
1. If you want something totally open source: https://github.com/RemiPelloux/OpenPlod
Local-first Plaud Note Pro recording vault, transcription, and Markdown workspace. Which sounds like what you want.
2. the Plaud SDK will let you pull from the device and send it wherever you want without touching their servers.
3. You can also use the mobile app, disable cloud sync, and export each audio file as mp3/wav to your phone/tablet/whatever if you don't want to use #1 or #2.
You can have it upload to your private cloud without doing any of these, but it still transits their servers first i believe, which it sounds like you are trying to avoid
>Doctors also seem to react well to being able to be precise in descriptions of what happened when.
They also do that if you show them pictures of your poop when you have a bowel thing going on.
Thank you for this. The timing could not be more perfect; my husband was just diagnosed with prostate cancer last week and we have the first meeting with his urologist in less than an hour.
Glad it could be useful, and wishing you the best of luck with things
Focus on the good. It's not Crohns, so unless you've been given the "you have six months" speach, your quality of life is not over, nor is your life.
> AIs may downplay the seriousness of things. I was chatting with various models and most pushed me in the direction of “you don’t have cancer” for a while. Just something to note.
Hey, could you share one of these chats with the "Share chat" function? This might be of interest to a lot of law students.
Just by being posted here on hn, it will probably be discoverable by anyone that searches for cases where an LLM gave damaging medical advice.
> No one cares more about your case than you, so take control and send lots of follow-ups.
This advice can be applied to most things in the life. Expecting the machine in any context to take care of you will likely leave you disappointed.
Have had terrible pain and muscle clenching in my body since I was a teen (am 52 now) and for the past 15+ years, have been intensely working with the medical system to figure out the cause (have gotten a lot of great relief!). Agree with everything said in this blog in working with the medical system. To put my spin on it:
- You are the least-constrained team member in your healthcare: At an appointment, your doctors only get to spend ~30 min on your problem and it's unrealistic to expect them to be as deeply involved as you are on your healthcare. Yeah, you yourself can spend days or even weeks researching you health problems and planning your healthcare.
- Research your health problems: you don't need to be an expert to read about your health problem, learn the basic anatomy involved and the high and mid-level details of the surgery or treatment. You'll have to look up a lot of terms, but it's not that bad and the articles aren't that difficult to understand at a high-level.
- You are also the manager of your healthcare: Planning and seeing the big picture is critical. You can optimize a lot of the planning of appointments, exams and surgeries buy thoughtful planning. And, you can definitely catch a lot of opportunties and mistakes in decisions that are made. Just like in a tech project, a couple of good random ideas can lead you to some fantastic outcomes.
There are many more, but yeah, working with the healthcare system is an skill that can be studied and learned. Really useful.
Thanks for sharing. i hope you get through this.
Any services that would do this for you?
Thanks! I'm saving it for hopefully never. I hope your treatment is/was successful!
Why “when you get” instead of “if you get”. Title assumes we all end up with cancer.
39.2% (!!!) of people get diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives
"You can find the “Standard of Care” flow charts for every cancer type. "
This is good advice for any non simple medical problem. Because while you may not have the book knowledge and definitely not the clinical experience you probably can tell when your care is deviating from standard care.
> but I’d move to schedule it at a top cancer center as soon as you are relatively sure of your diagnosis
Oh the privilege.
Maybe if you stop and think about it, that isn't the best way to phrase what you mean when talking about people with cancer.
have you tried PNC-27 peptide? Another option is focused ultrasound (HIFU) that I would look into before going the traditional route, which might kill you quicker than the cancer itself.
https://journals.lww.com/ajg/fulltext/00000434-201710001-018...
Note untested medicine is untested.
Frankly, I have the impression that doctors at large put as little care towards their patients’ health as us programmers do towards our software.
Sure, there are bad apples in medicine just like there are in tech. But knowing many doctors personally, reading this fills me with equal parts frustration at your cynicism and sadness for what they endure.
What's the difference for a physician today vs. 30 years ago? Among other things, today's physicians struggle because they're being crushed: continuously squeezed by the financialization of their hospital/practice, carrying larger debt, more time spent fighting the insurance machine just to get basic treatments approved. On top of all of that, they are less respected in general and often face outright hostility from patients... all while being paid relatively less than their predecessors.
The comparison rankles, obviously.
Building ivory castles and whatnot? ;)