Thanks! I'm saving it for hopefully never. I hope your treatment is/was successful!

Thanks for sharing. i hope you get through this.

I just had my 11th year in remission after 2 stem cell transplants. The best advice I can give is you need to be your own advocate, ask questions about everything, clinical trials, what treatment looks like if initial treatment isn't enough. Let me know if I can be of any help or if you have any questions.

Any services that would do this for you?

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.

> 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.

Why “when you get” instead of “if you get”. Title assumes we all end up with cancer.

"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.

When my wife got stage 3 cancer, the doctors initially made the decision that she would get standard chemo, but I had done a lot of LLM-assisted research the weekend before and we had essentially come up with a full decision tree in our heads so we knew that if test results show A, then we want option X, otherwise if B and C, we want option Y otherwise if B but not C, we want option Z... And so when the doctor told us the test results, we understood straight away that my wife had the rarer form of cancer which didn't respond well to chemo and responded well to immunotherapy. So it was a shock when the doctor suggested that she would be put on standard chemo-radiation therapy. Immunotherapy wasn't even mentioned in the conversation. We pushed back and asked for immunotherapy to be considered. We had to wait one additional week for the decision, but they essentially agreed with this course of action. We got lucky because the class of drug we needed was only just made available on the public health system in my country 1 month prior at the discretion of the doctor. Also, very glad we switched to a private oncologist (everything prior had been done in the public health system). So far, it seems to have been a good decision because they did a test just 1 month into treatment and the tumor had shrunk by almost 50%. I struggle to imagine how different our lives would be if we hadn't pushed back.

Her cancer was the exact same kind, down to every detail as the one which was tested in one of the most successful cancer trials in history; 100% success rate of full recovery with no surgery. Also, her specific genetic profile was an exact match for about half of participants in that trial. Essentially she was a textbook perfect candidate for immunotherapy so it's mind-boggling that it wasn't the first recommended option.

Frankly, I have the impression that doctors at large put as little care towards their patients’ health as us programmers do towards our software.