“A man with a watch knows the time; a man with two watches is never sure.”

I imagine reasons for what you’re asking might include:

* Prompting an LLM is work, and they’re already overworked just doctoring—every conversation with a computer is a conversation you’re not having with a patient;

* They’re probably right more often than they’re wrong;

* “When you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras”: the 15th case today of strep throat is probably strep throat, regardless of today’s 15th falsely-confident LLM weighing-up;

* They tend to have spent many many years honing a clinical intuition that makes an examination, to some degree, hard to articulate fully to the LLM;

* Liability/overdiagnosis: All this stuff is probabilistic. Inevitably, there’s going to be a time when the LLM throws out something I thought unlikely that turns out to be right, and there will be other times when it’s wrong but now I have to document why. How many false leads do I need to chase per one true differential? Does this really compare favorably to seeking a second opinion from another human doctor?

* Not everything needs to make it into the record. Once it’s in the LLM, it’s discoverable and litigable and hackable and permanent;

* Medicine is practiced in very different ways in different contexts—even in this thread, one radiologist routinely orders ultrasounds for soft tissue shoulder problems, and the other medical-world person replying has never heard of such a thing—presumably both within US health care contexts. Some doctors hand out antibiotics like candy, others are more cautious with respect to resistance. What’s right can depend on the time, the place, the clinical setting—more than just the immediate patient-level facts at hand, in ways that become awkward or unwise to express explicitly.

And of course… who’s to say they don’t do LLM-assisted research, in cases where they think it might be helpful?

> I don't understand why doctors don't prompt LLMs before saying wrong things. Is it ego?

Either that or laziness I'd imagine. This isn't limited to LLMs. Expert digital assistant systems that you query have existed for a long time. A good physician will double check anything even slightly unexpected against one.