After a mother could not find the cause of her then 4-year-old son's chronic pain, she turned to the help of an unconventional source: artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. Courtney's son, Alex, began experiencing pain during the COVID-19 lockdown. The pain didn't subside. It began worsening and being accompanied by other different symptoms, all of which raised concern for the mom.
Over a span of three years, she took her son to visit 17 different doctors and specialists, hoping to get some answers, all to no avail. But when she turned to ChatGPT, she found her son's correct diagnosis in just a matter of minutes.
“[Our nanny] started telling me, ‘I have to give him Motrin every day, or he has these gigantic meltdowns,’” Courtney said of the time when Alex's pain first started. “If he had Motrin, he was totally fine." He went on to start chewing on things, stopped growing taller, experienced severe headaches and exhaustion.
“I went line by line of everything that was in his [MRI notes] and plugged it into ChatGPT,” Courtney explained. “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.” The results led her to tethered cord syndrome, so she joined a Facebook group for families of children with it and noticed that their stories sounded similar to her son's. She scheduled an appointment with a new neurosurgeon. “She said point blank, 'Here’s occulta spina bifida, and here’s where the spine is tethered.'”
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Alex was able to undergo surgery to fix his tethered cord syndrome after receiving the diagnosis. Though he is still in recovery, his mom says she can see the joy on his face now. “There’s nobody that connects the dots for you,” she said. “You have to be your kid’s advocate.”
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