'DeepSeek is humane. Doctors are more like machines': my mother's worrying reliance on AI for health advice

[erronis]

https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2025/dec/12/deepseek-is-humane-doctors-are-more-like-machines-my-mothers-worrying-reliance-on-ai-for-health-advice-podcast

Tired of a two-day commute to see her overworked doctor, my mother turned to tech for help with her kidney disease. She bonded with the bot so much I was scared she would refuse to see a real medic

This essay was originally published on Rest of world
By Viola Zhou

Every few months, my mother, a 57-year-old kidney transplant patient who lives in a small city in eastern China, embarks on a two-day journey to see her doctor. She fills her backpack with a change of clothes, a stack of medical reports and a few boiled eggs to snack on. Then, she takes a 90-minute ride on a high-speed train and checks into a hotel in the eastern metropolis of Hangzhou.

At 7am the next day, she lines up with hundreds of others to get her blood taken in a long hospital hall that buzzes like a crowded marketplace. In the afternoon, when the lab results arrive, she makes her way to a specialist’s clinic. She gets about three minutes with the doctor. Maybe five, if she’s lucky. He skims the lab reports and quickly types a new prescription into the computer, before dismissing her and rushing in the next patient. Then, my mother packs up and starts the long commute home.

DeepSeek treated her differently.

My mother began using China’s leading AI chatbot to diagnose her symptoms this past winter. She would lie down on her couch and open the app on her iPhone.

“Hi,” she said in her first message to the chatbot, on 2 February.

“Hello! How can I assist you today?” the system responded instantly, adding a smiley emoji.

. . .

[snot]

2. Please excuse if this is a tangent, but

I was thinking just recently of how far my experiences with health care in the US have deteriorated since maybe 20 years ago. In the old days, the best doctors seemed to genuinely care about understanding your disorder and effectively addressing it. Now, even though I'm referred to some of the "best" doctors, I feel like they're just going through the motions, completely incurious about any aspects that might be relevant but aren't on some checklist... it's almost as if they were preparing us for their own replacement by AI's.

It also seems to take MUCH longer to get in to see a doctor now (I've had to wait as long as 4 months, even in a major metropolitan area), which of course leaves more time for one's condition to worsen and become more complicated. Has the number of docs per capita declined that much?

Docs also seem more specialized. What I used to get done through one specialist now takes two or three; and you have to get a referral from #1 to even make and appointment with #2, and so on – often further delaying any actual solution to the problem.

It all seems FAR less efficient than it used to be; and I'd think the work is far less interesting for the docs. I think some of these trends are probably driven by our corporate health care & insurance system in the US.

[erronis]

4. I totally agree. And my cardiologist doesn't want to know about my blood cancer.

Not in his wheelhouse.

As someone said to me yesterday, doctors (and the industry) "objectify" the patients. Treat them as items to be dealt with.

[jfz9580m]

7. Sorry to hear you have blood cancer Erronis

[erronis]

10. Thank you. If it ain't one thing, it'll be another....

Take every day as they come!

[appalachiablue]

6. Also PE, Private Equity, for profit investors buy up Drs offices, clinics, hospitals, more, cut staff, services

[hlthe2b]

3. I am appalled at how much personal, identifying information--including detailed medical info patients are posting to AI

with essentially zero protections for that data. Everything can be used against them, whether for scams, identity theft, blackmail (in some cases), and obviously urging them to do or purchase things that can harm/kill them!

I admit. I never saw this coming SO FAST. I do not know how to fight it. The most educated and already skeptical will listen to me, but that is NOT the majority.

[erronis]

5. Along with musk/doge stealing all the data they could from the US health agencies.

Per your last sentence: The sheep don't WANT to know what's happening. They'll follow the flock until they become food or fertilizer.

[jfz9580m]

9. This article makes me appreciate my doctors here

My mother has told me that whenever she steps into her nephrologist’s office, she feels like a schoolgirl waiting to be scolded. She fears annoying the doctor with her questions. She also suspects that the doctor values the number of patients and earnings from prescriptions over her wellbeing

None of my doctors have ever been anything like this. It’s why I have a fair amount of faith in doctors (outside psychiatry - the few doctors I have had negative experiences with have been psychiatrists and even there it is 50-50. I didn’t like the shrinks with my sleazy former employer in the US. But the psychiatrist outside the school was very cool like the therapist. I disliked the two boorish shrinks I came across here in 2012 as well, but not the shrink with my main hospital. She was decent). And while I have cobbled together a DIY mental health strategy, it is AI free and I would still prefer my original shrink in the US who prescribed Adderall which actually helped over my AI shilling sleazy former employer.

A documentary I found via the inimitably awesome Yasha Levine, made it easier to grasp what the deal with the Rosenhan Experiment actually was:

Another strand in the documentary is the work of R. D. Laing, whose work in psychiatry led him to model familial interactions using game theory. His conclusion was that humans are inherently selfish and shrewd and spontaneously generate stratagems during everyday interactions. Laing's theories became more developed when he concluded that some forms of mental illness were merely artificial labels, used by the state to suppress individual suffering. This belief became a staple tenet of counter-culture in the 1960s. Reference is made to an experiment run by one of Laing's students, David Rosenhan, in which bogus patients, self-presenting at a number of American psychiatric institutions, were falsely diagnosed as having mental disorders, while institutions, informed that they were to receive bogus patients, misidentified genuine patients as imposters. The results of the experiment were a disaster for American psychiatry, because they destroyed the idea that psychiatrists were a privileged elite that was genuinely able to diagnose, and therefore treat, mental illness.
Curtis credits the Rosenhan experiment with the inspiration to create a computer model of mental health. Input to the program consisted of answers to a questionnaire. Curtis describes a plan of the psychiatrists to test the computer model by issuing questionnaires to "hundreds of thousands" of randomly selected Americans. The diagnostic program identified over 50% of the ordinary people tested as suffering from some kind of mental disorder. According to Jerome Wakefield, who refers to the test as "these studies", the results it found were viewed as a general conclusion that "there is a hidden epidemic." Leaders in the psychiatric field never addressed whether the computer model was being tested or used without having been validated in any way, but rather used the model to justify vastly increasing the portion of the population they were treating.

Google’s Thomas Insel would totally be a shill for some awful new AI and data driven or VR shilling bs for mental health. A pox on all these creeps.

I am wary of hospital admins - they are usually not doctors anyway. They have MBAs. That’s where the profit driven crap comes in.

And doctors who are influencers..yeah that I would avoid. I love my onc. He is the opposite of that and such a good doctor. He is pretty overworked though.

This article repeats a lot of outdated narratives about aging societies and reads like a pitch for more AI than not. That’s an ad dressed up as a humblebrag. Doctors here are overworked because of overpopulation. You can’t train doctors at the same pace at which people have kids. So the idea is more growth of this noxious kind with stolen medical and academic data and theft from our living and working spaces. More formal discussion of family planning without eugenics in public health, that would help. Unsustainable..this Ponzi scheme worldview. Even though Steve Chu works at the execrable Stanford (which no decent human should going forward), he got that part right.

This is why I am filing complaints about this stuff from the last 14-15 years. I am drafting a post about it for activist HQ to initiate pushback.