Treatment, evidence, imitation, and chat

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: Weisenthal, Samuel J.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Weisenthal, Samuel J.
author_facet Weisenthal, Samuel J.
contents Large language models are thought to have the potential to aid in medical decision making. This work investigates the degree to which this might be the case. We start with the treatment problem, the patient's core medical decision-making task, which is solved in collaboration with a clinician. We discuss different approaches to solving it, including, within evidence-based medicine, experimental and observational data. We then discuss the chat problem, and how this differs from the treatment problem -- in particular with respect to imitation (and how imitation alone cannot solve the true treatment problem, although this does not mean it is not useful). We then discuss how a large-language-model-based system might be trained to solve the treatment problem, highlighting that the major challenges relate to the ethics of experimentation and the assumptions associated with observation. We finally discuss how these challenges relate to evidence-based medicine and how this might inform the efforts of the medical research community to solve the treatment problem. Throughout, we illustrate our arguments with the cholesterol medications, statins.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_23040
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Treatment, evidence, imitation, and chat
Weisenthal, Samuel J.
Other Statistics
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models are thought to have the potential to aid in medical decision making. This work investigates the degree to which this might be the case. We start with the treatment problem, the patient's core medical decision-making task, which is solved in collaboration with a clinician. We discuss different approaches to solving it, including, within evidence-based medicine, experimental and observational data. We then discuss the chat problem, and how this differs from the treatment problem -- in particular with respect to imitation (and how imitation alone cannot solve the true treatment problem, although this does not mean it is not useful). We then discuss how a large-language-model-based system might be trained to solve the treatment problem, highlighting that the major challenges relate to the ethics of experimentation and the assumptions associated with observation. We finally discuss how these challenges relate to evidence-based medicine and how this might inform the efforts of the medical research community to solve the treatment problem. Throughout, we illustrate our arguments with the cholesterol medications, statins.
title Treatment, evidence, imitation, and chat
topic Other Statistics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23040