After years of watching her young son suffer in pain, a mother turned to an unlikely source for help. She spent three years taking her son to 17 different doctors who couldn’t explain why the little boy could no longer play with friends due to various mysterious symptoms. Frustrated, she turned to ChatGPT and finally got the answers she sought.
The mom, who asked to be identified only as Courtney, told Today that when her 4-year-old son Alex began to experience pain during the COVID-19 lockdown, she was unsure what was happening. As long as he had Motrin, he was OK. As more unexplained symptoms popped up, however, she knew she needed help from a doctor.
Courtney and Alex began their journey at the dentist.
She told Today that Alex’s nanny was the first to report the pain and a change in his demeanor. “(Our nanny) started telling me, ‘I have to give him Motrin every day, or he has these gigantic meltdowns,'” Courtney, told the news program. “If he had Motrin, he was totally fine.”
Then he started to chew on things, so she took him to the dentist. Alex was examined, and the dentist thought that he was grinding his teeth and sent him to a special orthodontist. This doctor saw that Alex’s palate was too small, which could account for breathing issues, which could affect sleep, and might be the answer to his crabbiness. She gave him a palate extender, which helped.
“Everything was better for a little bit,” Courtney said. “We thought we were in the home stretch.”
But Alex's health continued to deteriorate.
Although the palate extender offered relief, Courtney noticed Alex wasn’t growing. A trip to the pediatrician ended with the mother being told that it was likely the effects of the pandemic.
Courtney wasn’t convinced and took him back to the doctor in 2021 for a checkup and saw that he had only grown slightly. Then he started to drag his leg and have headaches. The mother was extremely concerned. They visited a host of specialists, but no one could pinpoint what was happening.
“Nobody’s willing to solve for the greater problem,” she said, via Today. “Nobody will even give you a clue about what the diagnosis could be.”
Courtney turned to artificial intelligence after seeing more than a dozen doctors with no diagnosis.
Courtney told Today that she signed up for a ChatGPT account and started to enter information about Alex’s medical conditions.
“I went line by line of everything that was in his (MRI notes) and plugged it into ChatGPT,” she said. “I put the note in there about … how he wouldn’t sit crisscross applesauce. To me, that was a huge trigger (that) a structural thing could be wrong.”
She quickly found something that sounded familiar.
A condition called tethered cord syndrome popped up, and it seemed to describe what was happening to her son. She made an appointment with a neurosurgeon, who confirmed the AI information and said that Alex had a form of spina bifida that was undiagnosed at birth. His spinal cord was essentially tethered and needed surgery to repair.
Alex had a repair surgery and is recovering. His mother told Today, “There’s nobody that connects the dots for you,” she explained. “You have to be your kid’s advocate.”
More from CafeMom: Mom Says Her Family Was Accidentally ‘Poisoning’ Themselves for Weeks
ChatGPT can be helpful for patients who want answers.
Andrew Beam, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard who studies machine learning models and medicine, explained to Today how ChatGPT works. “Anytime you ask a question of ChatGPT, it’s recalling from memory things it has read before and trying to predict the piece of text,” he said.
There are free and paid versions of ChatGPT, with the paid version offering better results, but ChatGPT isn’t a replacement for doctors. Today warned that AI can just make up an answer if it can’t find what a person is looking for. Still, Beam said it can be an excellent resource for those who can’t find help elsewhere.
“I do think ChatGPT can be a good partner in that diagnostic odyssey. It has read literally the entire internet. It may not have the same blind spots as the human physician has,” he explained.
